I'm going to try and attempt to summarize the vast wealth of information going around.

With patch 2.4 out, I'm adding new data as we learn things.

If you are only interested in what a particular talent build or piece of loot does for you, I recommend using the spreadsheet by Leulier, linked at the bottom.

Warlocks have many great talents, and there is lots of room for customizing your spec. Consequently there are many viable hybrid builds, each requiring a different play style. To keep this guide short, I'll focus on the three main tiers and their most sensible pve raid builds. Even within those there are a lot of variations possible.



Affliction

Affliction focuses on dots. Typical demon choice for this style is imp. Even though your crit chance is lower than that of destruction warlocks, you'll want to have improved shadow bolt.

Examples
classic Spec
Raid support with UA
Raid support with Ruin

As mentioned before, there is plenty of flexibility in the early parts of the Affliction tree.

Play style
- Optimal strategy is to keep Unstable Affliction, Corruption, Siphon Life and a curse active on your target. When all your dots are up you will be using that time to throw Shadow Bolts or Dark Pact/Life tap. Good timing is important: never refresh a dot effect before it has run its full duration, but minimize the time between the last tic and reapplying. For example, you want to start casting Unstable Affliction before the last tic hits, so that the last tic happens during the cast and UA is reapplied almost immediately after.
- You probably want to use an addon like DoTimer | World of Warcraft @ Curse.com or Forte Gaming / Forte Warlock Addon for this. There is no fixed rotation since your dots have different durations.
- Get your imp buffed, blessing of wisdom helps a lot for his mana regeneration, which you can siphon off with dark pact. Imps can only be buffed when they are not phase shifted.
- Despite Drain Life getting a lot of benefits, Shadow Bolts will always outdamage it. Drain life is the most mana efficient spell since you're effectively gaining life/mana.

Strong and weak points
- More mana efficient and self sufficient than other trees.
- Ideal in situations when two or more mobs are being tanked, as you can dot them all.
- This spec provides less burst damage, and scales worse with gear than other specs.
- Bloodpact can be nice to boost party hit points, especially on fights where a tank can get flattened fast, or where there is lots of aoe damage on the raid.
- Can come with Malediction, which scales with the amount of Shadow/Arcane users in the raid. It adds 2.7% over the untalented CoS. (113% talented, 110% untalented, 1.13/1.1 = 102.73%)
- Can come with Shadow Embrace, which reduces the melee damage on the tank by 5%. This effect is multiplicative: if your tank would take a 1000 hit it'll be 950 with SE.
- Due to the high amount of raid benefits (Blood Pact, Malediction, Shadow Embrace), having at least one affliction warlock in a raid is recommended.
- This build uses a lot of debuff slots. As soon as the cap of 40 debuffs on a mob is reached, the oldest ones will start falling off. For this reason, too many affliction warlocks in a raid will hamper one another. If you're having trouble with debuffs being pushed off, you can use a lower rank of CoS (see Curses, below), have all warlocks use only the optimal dots, or get Warlocks to respec to another tree. (also, see the Debuff count addon linked at the bottom of this post)
- Most affliction warlocks use Suppresion to reach the hit cap early on, and spec out of it when they obtain more +hit on their gear.

Variants
Affliction builds have access to several talents that can support the raid: Improved blood pact, Malediction, and Shadow Embrace. Most variants are therefore tradeoffs between these and talents that will increase the Warlock's personal dps.

Optimally just one warlock in the raid should have them. The UA support build is recommended at starting levels, with the Ruin support build likely to perform a bit better at end level raiding, due to high amounts of hit and crit rating on pieces at that level.

30/21/10 keeps popping up as an alternative build. It's been harshly criticised every time it was proposed. See post #78 and beyond in this thread for details.


Basic gear choices (see below)
Spell hit (until capped with suppression) > Spell damage > Spell haste & Crit

After obtaining 76 hit rating with 5/5 Suppression, warlock dots are hit capped. Further extra hit rating only affects Shadow Bolts/Immolate, and is worth less than spell damage on a point-for-point basis.






Demonology

Demonology in raids is about making best use of your top tier Demonology talents. The strength of these can make up for the lackluster mid tier Demonology ones.

Demonologists get a boost to spell power, get a 5% damage bonus due to soul link, and get +5% to crit with spells. It is vital their pet stays alive, though. A Demonologist without a pet is very ineffective.

Raiding With Felguard (SSC, TK, Hyjal, BT) - The Warlocks Den is a great resource for aspiring Demonologists.

Examples
Standard Spec with high focus on ISB
Another version with improved Life Tap
Demonology without a Felguard using a Succubus instead to obtain Ruin.

Play Style & tips
- Keeping your Felguard or Succubus alive is key. Micro managing your pet is vital, since it dying means losing a lot of dps.
- Spell rotations are similar to affliction, with a higher accent on (improved) Shadow Bolts.
- Remember to have your pet attack from the back. Melee attacks from the front can be parried, which can cause a faster attack on the MT. Avoid this at all costs. Update: this has been patched, and demons will now position themselves behind their target.
- Ask for buffs on your pet. His stamina and intellect will boost your attack power, and it'll allow him to stay alive longer. BoW should help too
- One point in Mana Feed will allow the Felguard to cleave for 5 minutes
- If you choose to use a Succubus, don't have her use Lash of Pain on the primary target, as it eats ISB debuff charges.
- [Sporeling Snack] and [Kibler's Bits] work on Warlock Pets. The latter is a reward from the cooking quests from the goblin in Shattrath.
- Greater blessings cast on warlocks will also affect their demons, except the Felguard. Felguard and hunter pets get the greater blessings cast on Warriors instead. Phase shifted imps do NOT receive buffs.
- Demons about to die can be dismissed and nearly instantly resummoned with Fel Domination. This will conserve their buffs, and bring them back with full health and mana. The command to dismiss a demon is /run PetAbandon(), which can be macro'd and assigned to a button.

Strong and weak points
- Demonology relies on having the Felguard/Succubus out, so the effectiveness varies a lot. Some fights are brutal towards pets.
- It is the most versatile spec due to the demons each having different effects on you.
- Best choice for Warlock offtanks in specific encounters (Leotheras being a prime example)
- Demonology is probably the least gear dependent of all three specs. Exception is the tier 5 two piece set bonus : [Hood of the Corruptor]. This set bonus make a vast difference. [Void Star Talisman] is also really useful in keeping your pet alive. Before obtaining those items, demonology is likely to perform less well than the alternatives due to the extra healing required on the pet. Shadow Priests in your group will obviously help a lot for pet survivability.
- Demonologists want a raidbuffed demon out at all times. Make sure to resummon it before raid buffs are applied, or you'll end up having to ask for buffs on your pet. These buffs have huge effects on your demon and on your spellpower. It can become quite a hassle to have to ask for buffs: most healers don't have pets included in their UI and having to ask for buffs on a pet can become quite tedious. Especially the Succubus is prone to dying quite fast.

Variants
The Succubus build is an alternative to 0/21/40. It has Demonic Tactis (5% crit) and Soul Link and Demonic Knowledge (typically around +200 damage for a raid buffed succubus). It doesn't have the 0/21/40 Backlash (3% crit) and SnD (20% spellpower to Shadow Bolt/Incinerate). For reference, a Succubus has a lot less hit points and has no avoidance to aoe effects compared to a Felguard.

Basic gear choices (see below)
Spell hit > Spell damage > Spell Haste > Spell Crit

As mentioned before, tier 5 two part bonus is very useful for this spec, as is [Void Star Talisman] which drops from Solarian in TK.

Stamina and Intellect and Demonic Knowledge:
Demons get a Stamina boost equal to 30% of their owner, same for Intellect, which translates into 15% Spell power.

With talents:
1 stamina on items =
1.15 stamina on Warlock (Demonic Embrace) =
0.3968 Stamina on Demon (Fel Stamina 15%, Demon Sta contribution 30%) =
0.0595 spellpower (15% Demonic Knowledge)
0.0720 spellpower with kings on both demon and owner

So 1 sta = 0.072 spellpower with BoK.

It also boosts your Succubus hit points with 2.9 without kings (update needed for Felguard, can anyone tell me the stamina to hit point conversion? It's demon dependent, Succubi get 7 health per sta)

1 intellect =
0.345 int to demon (Fel Intellect 15%, Demon Int Contribution 30%) =
0.052 spell power (15% Demonic Knowledge)
0.062 spell power with kings on both demon and owner.
So with Kings 1 int = 0.062 spellpower (and 0.3 crit rating, as listed further in this post)

Gearing for Stamina or Intellect in order to obtain higher spellpower through Demonic Knowledge will yield very insignificant returns, especially compared to how buffs like Fortitude and Arcane Intellect on the demon will affect it. Because of this, Stamina's only real function is to give you (and to a lesser extent, your demon) a larger health pool.



Destruction

Due to Shadowfury's limited use in raids, the typical Destruction build is 0/21/40, taking a few subpar talents in Demonology to obtain Demonic Sacrifice, which boost shadow damage by 15%.

This build focuses primarily on Shadow and Flame, Ruin, and Demonic Sacrifice, resulting in Shadow Bolts with a high damage coefficient from spell power. (3/3.5 + 0.2 from talents, or rougly 105.7%)

It's very important to keep the Improved Shadow Bolt Debuff (ISB) up as much as possible, since it provides 20% extra shadow damage to the entire raid while it is active. (including dots - this is a common misconception). Destruction warlocks consequently put a higher value on crit rating than other builds do, since it helps with ISB uptime..

At low gear levels, fire spells are competitive, but they scale considerably worse compared to their shadow counterparts due to the ISB debuff. As gear improves Shadow Bolt will become more and more powerful compared to the other spells.

This spec scales best with gear, and will clearly outperform affliction on high gear levels (Hyjal/BT). For starting raiders, affliction gets a head start due to the hit bonus of Suppression and the mechanics of dots putting spell damage to work while needing virtually no other stats. When +hit gear becomes more easily available, the gap closes.

There has been much debate about what the exact gear treshold is, for destruction to outperform affliction. Opinions are divided on the matter. Both specs require different play styles, resulting in boss fights typically favoring one spec over the other. ISB damage is hard to measure. Because of this it is virtually impossible to get solid evidence. The debate is unlikely to cease any time soon.

The old rule of thumb "you need Hyjal/BT gear for destruction to be viable" is most definitely untrue. Anecdotal evidence suggests Destruction warlocks with Kharazan or tailored gear outperform equally geared affliction warlocks. Your mileage may vary, as player skill and latency are likely to be far more determining factors.


Examples
Default build
Hybrid Fire Destruction
Full fire destruction
Destruction with Siphon Life
Destruction with Shadowfury

Play style
- Spam Shadow Bolts and curses. Life Tap at opportunate times. Bring potions, healthstones and bandages.
- Curse of Doom and Curse of Agony still provide higher dps over Shadow Bolts provided your target lives long enough.
- At lower spelldamage levels Corruption will be viable, provided you have enough debuff slots, you get the full 6 tics, you're not threat capped and you don't need to move to cast it (no extra range talent).
- If CoE and improved Scorch are up, talented Immolate will outdamage Shadow Bolt on damage-per-casting-time at every realistic gear choice, even if accounting for the extra mana cost and ISB procs. If all of these factors are absent, Shadow Bolt might be the better choice depending on gear (better gear favors SB).
- At the start of a fight you may want to apply Corruption then Immolate regardless of gear, since starting early with Shadow Bolts can easily outaggro the tank if he gets an unlucky string of dodges/misses/parries on the pull, and you crit your first couple of spells.
- Since you require Life Taps, having some way to monitor raid health is recommended. When the raid is topped up, a Life Tap or two will result in Flashes of Light or Renew/Rejuvenation on you, all of which are very mana efficient. Moderation is key, since a string of consecutive Life Taps will set off alarm bells, diverting healer attention.

Strong and weak points
- This spec has the most powerful burst damage. This is a boon when things need to die quick, but it makes it harder to manage threat while still maximizing dps.
- It is the least mana efficient spec, requiring the occasional heal to be able to keep dpsing.
- Destruction warlocks will need a healthy amount of healthstones, healing potions and bandages in case healing is scarce. Having to stop dpsing to bandage or drain life will make your dps drop dramatically.
- Scales the best with gear, due to Shadow Bolts getting a 106% bonus per +damage (3/3.5 + 0.2 from talents), which result in more dps bonus than any other spell for any spec.
- ISB uptime is hard to measure or model, but provides a boost in shadow damage to the entire raid.
- This spec requires a lot less management since there are no real dots to keep track of, and no pet that can die. Some warlock dislike the lack of variety in spells used, others prefer it because it allows them to focus on other things, like keeping an overview of what is happening.
- Conflagrate, like Shadowburn has very limited use in raids, as Shadow Bolts outdamage it.


Variants:
The fire specs use Incinerate over Shadow Bolts. It is more mana efficient, but has no synergy with other Warlocks/Shadow Priests since you're not contributing to ISB. Probably only competitive with the standard build when there are no Shadow users in the raid at all, and fire mages are keeping improved Scorch up. It is listed for completeness.

The Siphon Life spec drops Demonic Sacrifice for Improved Life Tap and Siphon Life, making you more self reliant. Key talents are the standard destro ones (SnF, Ruin, +8% crit) and Siphon Life. Not as high dps output as the default build, but does require less heals and Life Taps and provides Blood Pact.

The Shadowfury spec drops Demonic Sacrifice for Shadowfury and some affliction talents. Not as high dps output as the default build, but gets improved Life Tap, Shadowfury and provides Blood Pact. Shadowfury has very limited use in raids, but is very powerful in encounters where it does work. (Hydross, Morogrim, Vashj, Solarian and in Hyjal / ZA)

Nether protection is good on only a few encounters (Illhoof, Theron Gorefiend, Archimonde). It does not proc off Leotheras's Demon phase Fire Bolts, so this will not affect your ability to tank him. This is not the case for later bosses (Capernian, Illidan) that can normally also be tanked by warlocks in certain phases: you will not be able to tank these reliably with Nether Protection. Use of a /cancelaura Nether Protection macro can alleviate but not solve the problem.


Basic gear choices (see below)
Spell hit > Spell Haste /Spell damage / Crit.



General gearing issues:


There are 4 main statistics for a warlock for dps:
Spell damage
Spell hit
Spell haste rating
Spell crit


Each of these has diminishing returns. As a result, there is no fixed tradeoff rate for one versus the other. Different specs will also focus on different stats.

Tools to determine tradeoffs for hit/crit/haste rating and spelldamage for your specific talent build and gear selection are linked below.

Spell hit is a special case, because it provides the most effective way to increase dps on bosses and is useless on everything else beyond 5%. The hit cap versus bosses is 16% (202 spell hit rating, unless you have a Draenei or a Totem of Wrath). Typically Warlocks will use two sets of gear, one for bosses and another for trash mobs or add fights.

Spell haste rating largely depends on the spells you use. Destruction warlocks will favor it most, affliction ones will like it the least.

Spell crit is only useful if you have ISB (which, however, all raiding warlocks should). Even then, the high amount of rating required for one crit % make it worth less than the other ratings.

This post describes well how tradeoffs work. That post is written with destruction warlocks in mind, but it is equally valid for Demonology and to a lesser extent affliction.

Rating vs ratio rates:
22.1 crit rating is 1% crit
15.77 haste rating is 1% extra casting speed.
12.6 hit rating is 1% hit

Update: more exact numbers are 12.6153 for hit, 15.76923 for haste, and 22.0769 for crit. For even more exact numbers, you can use [url=http://www.wowwiki.com/API_GetCombatRatingBonus]

Update: hit vs crit
It was demonstrated in this thread that 1% hit is about the same as 1% crit chance dpswise (depending on how you value ISB), for destro locks and better than 1% crit for everyone else. Because hit rating has a much bigger effect on hit chance than crit rating does on crit, hit rating will have a bigger effect on overal dps. Optimal dps strategy is therefore to cap your hit rating using gems, since gems offer equal amount of crit/hit.


update: Heroism/Bloodlust do NOT decrease the global cooldown of 1.5s for warlocks. Haste rating does (since patch 2.4) and is therefore a very good stat for any warlock now. Global cooldown is capped 1s, making the haste cap 50%, which is near 800, not obtainable in a raid setting. Haste still suffers from diminishing returns due to your MP5 not contributing, but for most purposes pretty much provides linear increase to your dps. Total dps = unhasted dps * (1+haste rating/1577)


Base stats:

Stamina
Having enough Stamina will prevent you from dying to random aoe abilities. After a certain treshold it will hardly affect you at all. See above for effect on Demonologists.

Intellect
Intellect will increase your base mana, which isn't very important in pve. In addition, 82 int grants 1% spellcrit, so it roughly 1 int = 0.27 crit rating. (0.3 with kings).

Spirit
If you have a Priest with Improved Divine Spirit present, 10% of your Spirit goes to spell power. Therefore 1 Spirit = 0.1 spelldamage. (0.11 with kings)



Meta gem choices:
[Imbued Unstable Diamond] from the Bash'ir event. Requires 100 apexis crystals and surviving the Bash'ir onslaught.
[Mystical Skyfire Diamond]
[Swift Starfire Diamond], obtained from Spirit Shards.
[Bracing Earthstorm Diamond]
[Chaotic Skyfire Diamond]

Chaotic Skyfire Diamond makes crits do 209% damage of a normal hit. (150% x 3% = 154.5%, with Ruin the crit damage bonus is doubled, so 209%)

For Destruction and Demonology, [Chaotic Skyfire Diamond] will be the best choice, but for Affliction there are multiple choices.


Basic gem choices:
Most obvious are:
[Veiled Noble Topaz]
[Runed Living Ruby]

Alternatives are:
[Great Dawnstone] Used early on to reach the hit cap
[Glowing Nightseye] Used only to meet exceptional socket bonuses or Metagem requirements.
[Potent Noble Topaz] Used only to meet exceptional socket bonuses or Metagem requirements after reaching the hit cap.

These same cuts are available for the Black Temple and Mt. Hyjal epic gems.

Todo: There are new haste gems in 2.4. They're likely to be better than the hit/crit equivalents and should be looked up. Feel free to help me out with these.


Crafted Gear for warlocks

The Spellstrike set is a good option.
[Spellstrike Hood]
[Spellstrike Pants]

[Belt of Blasting] is craftable using two nether vortexes. The pattern drops in SSC off trash.

Regardless of spec, tailoring warlocks can get the Frozen Shadoweave Set, which remains useful even in BT.
[Frozen Shadoweave Boots]
[Frozen Shadoweave Shoulders]
[Frozen Shadoweave Robe]

For engineers, the [Destruction Holo-gogs] are by far the best choice. They can be upgraded to [Annihilator Holo-Gogs]. The schematic is boe and drops in Sunwell Plateau (from trash, apparently, confirmation needed).

Leatherworking provides [Drums of Battle], duration 30 seconds and cooldown is two minute. Chain using these gives the rough equivalent of 20 haste per person, or 100 haste for one person.

Alchemy provides [Sorcerer's Alchemist Stone].


Trinkets

vendor purchasable trinkets:
[Darkmoon Card: Crusade] (Darkmoon card reward)
[Scryer's Bloodgem] (from vendor, requires scryer reputation)
[Icon of the Silver Crescent] (vendor, 41 Heroic Badges)
[Ashtongue Talisman of Shadows] (from vendor, requires exalted reputation with the Ashtongue Deathsworn in BT)

about the talisman:
The highly situational use of this trinket renders it useless to almost all warlocks, given its place in gear progression: Warlocks exalted with the Ashtongue typically already have very good trinkets. On single targets the Icon is better, even for Warlocks that have Instant Corruption. It can outdo the Icon on multiple targets, the theoretical threshold is around 20 Corruption tics per minute, provided you have Corruption talented.

As already mentioned [Sorcerer's Alchemist Stone] required SSO exalted reputation.

[Timbal's Focusing Crystal] drops off Priestess Delrissa (3rd boss in Magister's Terrace) on heroic mode. It is relatively easy to get, considering how good it is. Cooldown is supposed to be 15 seconds with a 10% proc chance. The effect is a mini shadow dot that does not eat ISB but is boosted by it. (confirmation needed).


Magister's Terrace and gearing up a new warlock

The loot in the new 5 man instance, introduced in 2.4, is far superior to all other dungeon loot in quality. In addition, Kael'thas drops heroic items in normal mode, and all bosses drop epic items in heroic mode.

Notable drops on normal mode:
[Bindings of Raging Fire] off Selin
[Band of Arcane Alacrity] off Vexallus
[Cloak of the Betrayed] and [Duskhallow Mantle] off Priestess Delrissa
[Gloves of Arcane Acuity] and [Kharmaa's Ring of Fate] off Kael'thas

Notable drops on heroic mode:
[Jaded Crystal Dagger] off Selin
[Fel-tinged Mantle] off Vexallus
[Timbal's Focusing Crystal] off Priest Delrissa
[Scarlet Sin'dorei Robes] off Kael'thas


Consumables to boost dps

[Drums of Battle] are the most effective way of boosting raid dps.

Using [Super Mana Potion] on every cooldown will boost your dps by reducing Life Tap downtime, especially if you have a [Sorcerer's Alchemist Stone].

[Destruction Potion] are the second best option. In fights that have down time where you can replenish your mana, they're the best option.



Warlock sets

Tier 4
[Voidheart Crown] - Prince Malchazaar
[Voidheart Mantle] - High King Maulgar
[Voidheart Robe] - Magtheridon
[Voidheart Leggings] - Gruul the Dragonkiller
[Voidheart Gloves] - Curator

2p set bonus reported to have a 10% proc rate and does proc off dots (confirmation needed).
4p set bonus grants both Corruption and Immolate an extra tic, increasing total damage per cast of Corruption by 16% and Immolate by roughly 12%.

Tier 5
[Leggings of the Corruptor] - Fathom-Lord Karathress
[Hood of the Corruptor] - Lady Vashj
[Gloves of the Corruptor] - Leotheras the Blind
[Mantle of the Corruptor] - Void Reaver
[Robe of the Corruptor] - Kael'thas Sunstrider

2p set bonus is incredibly good for demonologists, and useless to everyone else.
4p set bonus is worded strangely, it only applies to the base damage of the spell. The exact mechanics are unknown but it can be approximated as follows: for Corruption this resulsts in roughly 15 extra damage per remaining tic, before multipliers like CoS/Misery/ISB. This results in roughly 45-50 extra damage per shadowbolt before multipliers.

T6
[Leggings of the Malefic] - Illidari Council (BT)
[Hood of the Malefic] - Archimonde (MH)
[Gloves of the Malefic] - Azgalor (MH)
[Mantle of the Malefic] - Mother Shahraz (BT)
[Robe of the Malefic] - Illidan (BT)
[Bracers of the Malefic] - Kalecgos (SWP)
[Belt of the Malefic] - Brutallus (SWP)
[Boots of the Malefic] - Felmyst (SWP)

2p set bonus is nearly useless in raids.
4p set bonus grants 6% to the total damage of Shadowbolt. It is the equivalent of roughly 120-140 spellpower towards shadow bolt at that stage, depending on spec and gear.



End game loot choices
There is no definitive lists, it all depends on what gear you already have. Hit rating provides most bang for your buck on bosses until it is capped. Everything else is spec dependant.

For a rough list, you can punch in these numbers in lootzor.com - World of Warcraft search and rate items - profile your wow character :
spell damage = 1, shadow damage = 1, hit = 1
and depending on spec:
Affliction: crit = 0.5
Demonology: crit = 1, sta = 0.1, int = 0.1
Destruction: crit = 1.

Note that Destruction warlocks will want 4p T6 over any other available gear choice, as 6% bonus to shadow bolts worth more than 100 spell power. Demonologists will want 2p T5 over anything else.

Lootzor currently doesn't do haste rating, but haste would be around 1 / 1 / 1.2 for Affliction / Demonology / Destruction.


Area of effect spells
Seed of Corruption provides the highest dps for any spec and any gear quality, by a large margin. This is of course assuming you're not getting interrupted and hitting more than one target.

Hellfire is a bit lower dps, but a lot more mana efficient (although not health efficient, you will require more healing than with SoC + lifetap). Despite the lower damage throughput it still has its uses, especially for destruction warlocks that benefit from the threat reduction on it. It can also be used to instantly blow up Seed of Corruption.

Rain of Fire has received a boost, and is a low risk, mana efficient, ranged aoe spell now. Unfortunately its damage is nowhere near competitive with either Hellfire or SoC.

Aoe cap: if your seed of corruption detonates for more than 13580 on all targets combined, it will do less damage. When this happens, the detonation damage will be scaled down so that the total is 13580. For example, if you hit 10 targets with it, you will hit each for 1358. This reduction is done after calculating +damage gear, talents and buffs so it is the same for every gear and spec. The exceptions are crits and damage debuffs (like CoS), those will allow you to hit individual targets for more.


Curse selection
Curse of Shadow - Scales nicely with increasing number of Shadow Priests, Arcane Mages, and Warlocks (and hunters, to a lesser extent). Usually the default curse to put on an enemy. If you use the level 60 version it will not get knocked off by hitting the debuff cap.

Curse of the Elements - Boosts fire/frost mages, Warlock fire spells. An obvious choice if you have several of these present. As with CoS, if you use the level 60 version it will not get knocked off by hitting the debuff cap.

Curse of Doom - Very high Damage-Per-Casting-Time. Does not get a bonus from Shadow Mastery, for reasons unknown. Demonic Sacrifice with a Succubus will boost the damage by 15%, and ISB will boost it by 20%. Amplify Curse will only boost the base damage of 4200, so it's 2100 extra base damage. Curse of Doom can not crit.

Curse of Agony - Ideal for spamming on tanked trash, regardless of spec. Can also be used as an alternative to Curse of Doom, if that one is not an option. CoA is advisable on bosses that reset aggro (unless you can time CoD well), or on anything that will live 24 seconds but not 60. It can outdamage Curse of Doom on a strict dps basis, but you'll need to refresh it more often, resulting in a lower Damage Per Casting Time.

At around 1250 spellpower, affliction warlocks with imp CoA, and Shadow Mastery will obtain around equal dps with CoA over unamped CoD. More spellpower will favor CoA.

Curse of Recklessness - Stacks with every other armor reducing debuff, and will typically increase melee and hunter damage by around 6% if FF and 5xSunder Armor are present, according to http://elitistjerks.com/498690-post35.html. You typically want as many armor reducing debuffs on a boss as possible, since each one adds more (Increasing Returns, as opposed to Diminishing). It will make the enemy hit slightly harder, though. To be avoided when the boss has an ability that is based on his melee attack power, such as Mortal Strike or Cleave. Useful on enemies that don't hit hard enough for a tank to keep aggro, it will help with their threat generation on those by a small amount.

CoD vs CoR: Which one is more profitable depends on the raid setup. More physical dps means CoR becomes better, obviously. Physical Raid Dps needs to exceed (CoD damage / 3.6) for CoR to be the better choice. (CoD dps = CoD damage/60, and CoR dps = Physical dps *0.06). Note however that you need to refresh CoD twice as often.

Curse of Exhaustion - Very limited use. Typical use is for Striders during the Vashj fight, and on Mount Hyjal trash.

Curse of Weakness - Reduces attack power, but it doesn't stack with the other ap reducing abilities (Demoralizing Shout/Roar). It will get overwritten by a talented Warrior Demo Shout, which any raid community should have. The only possible use for it is if you are raiding without a Warrior and have a Paladin tanking.



Immolate vs Shadow Bolt

Immolate has a much higher base damage then Shadow Bolt, and both have around the same spellpower coefficient (85%). For this reason, at low amounts of spellpower, keeping Immolate up is clearly a better choice. Some well geared warlocks drop this spell in favor of Shadow Bolt due to any combination of these factors:

- Higher hit/crit/haste rating benefits Shadowbolt.
- ISB debuff
- Most debuffs tend to favor SB instead (absence of CoE, Imp Scorch, CoS, ISB)
- More talents into SB (Shadow Mastery, Demonic Sacrifice, Shadow And Flame)
- More items that benefit SB ([Ritssyn's Lost Pendant], [Orb of the Soul-Eater], [Nethervoid Cloak], [Boots of the Shifting Nightmare], FSW and Soulfrost)
- Debuff slot shortage
- Higher mana cost per point of damage, so more life tap down time

Whether it's worth it for you should be checked with the appropriate tools: ShadowSeer, Leulier's sheet, DrDamage (all linked below). Even a lower damage-per-casting-time, it is worth it occasionally if you don't think you'll have the time to get a SB off or can't risk threat bursts.

Fire vs Shadow

Prior to 2.4 there was no choice. With the buff to incinerate, it seems fire has become a viable raid spec. Fire has higher personal dps while shadow still has ISB. I haven't been able to determine yet whether the gain in personal dps can outbalance the loss on ISB. More research is needed. The answer will probably be dependent on the raid setup.


Resistances and Spell Penetration
The difference between level 60 and level 70 version of CoE/CoS: level 60 CoS has lower reduction (75 vs 88) but the same damage modifier. The level 60 version has higher priority, meaning it will not be pushed off by other debuffs. This is a relic from times before 40 debuff slots, and that the higher rank has lower priority is considered a bug. If you are having issues with debuffs being lost, use the lower rank.

With a few notable exceptions (Felhunters in Hyjal, Supremus vs Fire, and Illidari Council) enemies have no resistances above 75. Therefore spell penetration is considered useless in PVE in the majority of fights.

All mobs higher level than you an innate resistance, resulting in partial resists that can not be mitigated. Partial resists seem to happen around 15% of the time, resulting in roughly 3% damage mitigation.


Warlock tanking
For Leotheras tanking, there are a few good posts here.

Additional tips and tricks
- Obviously, bring a healthy amount of shards to raids. This is especially important for demo/destro, since they often summon demons that require Soul Shards.

- There is little reason to use anything but Rank 1 of Drain Soul.

- Soulwells are very useful, and it might be convenient to have all three variants in a raid community. Healthstones of different qualities (0/2, 1/2 and 2/2 improved) count as different items, meaning everyone can carry up to 3 healthstones this way. They still share the same cooldown of two minutes, though. Healthstones can crit (based on user spell crit chance) and will heal for 150% in that case.


Tools for measuring DPS
SWStats (or any other synching damage meter)
The other warlock dps spreadsheet is the default source for warlock theorycrafting.
ShadowSeer Beta - Measures ISB uptime, and will estimate benefits of crit/hit/haste rating and spelldamage bonuses. not working in v2.4
lootzor.com - World of Warcraft search and rate items - profile your wow character - Gives you a gear list according to stats you fill in
Leulier's ISB simulator - predicts ISB uptime using a simulated model
DrDamage - WowAce Wiki - will give you in-game theorycrafting

Other
Debuffcount counts the number of debuffs on a target, useful when you suspect dots are falling off.
Loot Rank - replacement for lootzor
Warcrafter - create gear sets and get stats, works well with planning and the spreadsheet.
Demon - Debuff Monitor (pDebuffList2) - replacement for debuffcount and debuff filter in one


Thanks for all the feedback and contributions!

Erm?

Also, in general you should always gear hit first for bosses, then focusing on spell damage (according to the spreadsheet it gives you more DPS than crit, even with Ruin).

Here's a good site for your trinket choices.
SimulationCraft/Trinkets/Warlock - Shadowpriest.com Wiki

Great summery, but isn't Stamina something more important to a Demo lock than what you make it out to be?

Just skimming over it, this post seems to have been rushed slightly, could do with cleaning up some of the mistakes, as pointed out above "unstable mutation" and also "There is no fixed rotation since your dots are on". On what? Just a couple of examples.

With some of the information a link to sources would also be beneficial, for instance, a link to Nyarlotheps (spelling) write up on demonology is a great resource for people looking to move into this spec. I also remember seeing somewhere a useful tool that can generate figures for raid ISB uptime, I know it's not much help me just telling you these without providing links myself but I don't have time at the moment, if it hasn't been updated at the weekend I'll start searching.

Just some suggestions, I was considering making a consolidation post myself over the weekend, but there is an awful lot of information to trawl through and reference, I wasn't expecting one to appear so quickly.

Couple of things that I see:

The first two Affliction builds links are switched.
Title of each build doesn't really match the actual spec, could just call it "PVE Affliction", instead of "- affliction style - Unstable Affliction (41/0/20)"
Perhaps an explanation of how Malediction is equal to 2.7%, I haven't seen the math on that.
Unimproved CoW is equal to a Warrior's unimproved Demo Shout, but an improved Demo Shout is stronger than an Improved CoW.
The level 60 rank of CoS and CoE will not be knocked off on a debuff capped (40 debuffs) target.
Curse of Doom's damage is not increased by Shadow Mastery.
The ideal level of hit is 16% when fighting bosses and can be reached with 202 hit from gear, or 164 hit with an Elemental Shaman's Totem of Wrath (37.8 hit), or 152 hit with an Alliance Draenei's Aura (12.6 hit.)
Add [Void Star Talisman] to the Demonology gear.

And just a little nitpick to clean it up a little, maybe take out alot of the extra spaces between sections and bullets and capitalize the section titles.


I'll think of more later.

No, it's just not as useless for Demo as it is for other builds.

If you're stacking stamina for the purpose of getting it back as spell damage via DK, you only get 4.5% of stamina as spell damage. Clearly a 9 spell damage gem is way more useful than one giving 12 stamina. Getting stamina (and to a lesser extent, intellect) back as spell damage is a really nice benefit of a Demo spec, since tier gear especially is loaded down with it, but stamina is not something to specifically itemize for.

If you're stacking stamina to keep your pet alive, you need to reevaluate either your pet control skills or whether a Felguard is a viable pet for a given fight. Your pet gets 30% of your stamina, so in order to give him, say, 500 more HP, you would need to itemize for 166 stamina instead of other stats, which is a significant DPS loss. If your pet is dying, stacking stamina is probably not the way to keep him alive - you either need some specific items (2 piece tier 5/void star talisman), a different group composition (read: one with a shadow priest), or better micro skills to keep him out of AoE.

All fixed. I can't find the demonology guide so a link would be appreciated.

Thanks for helping me clean it up.

Nyarlathotep's compiled guide for Felguard raiding can be found here - Raiding With Felguard (SSC, TK, Hyjal, BT) - The Warlocks Den

Considering the vast size of the warlock megathread, a summary like this for oft-asked questions is a useful thing, thank you.

I feel there is much room for improvement though. Just skimming it I noticed a few things.

1.) Add a section for a 0/40/21 guide.
2.) In the affliction section, emphasize SB spam between dot applications. A common noob mistake is to use drain life.
3.) Also in the affliction section, you tell people to refresh like crazy so they don't lose a tick. This will most likely cause people to refresh a dot before it expires, clipping the last tick and losing a lot of damage. You should tell them to focus on minimizing the gap between dots, but that ~1sec of downtime is normal and fine, and is better than clipping a tick.
4.) Clean up the language. This should not be a casual "this talent is cool" type of thing. Imagine you are writing a thesis. Make statements and support them. If there is a tradeoff, present the tradeoff and provide a conclusion. For example:

Would be better written in a straightforward and confident manner:

This build focuses on three key talents in demonology and destruction: demonic sacrifice (DS), ruin, and Shadow and Flame (SnF). The result is 21/40 scales with gear better than any other build. The order of priority is Hit > damage > crit. The actual coefficients can best be determined using the spreadsheet linked below, or for a rough guide, use the shadowpriest.com wiki linked below.

Q.) Fire or Shadow? Due to the following factors, shadow is always preferred for pve:

1.) ISB generation
2.) Shadowbolt's superior damage coefficient
3.) Prevalence of shadow synergy in raids including shadow weaving and ISB

Q.) When does itemization cause this build to rival or surpass affliction?

1.) Affliction gets a huge head start due to tailoring gear, hit capping with dots quickly via suppression, and the mechanics of dots putting spell damage to work while needing virtually no other stats.
2.) While crit is only important if you are the raid's ISB factory, damage and hit are both very important. You should be hit capped (202 hit rating, less if you are always partied with a Draenei or can count on wrath of air totem). Spell damage also scales very well due to shadow and flame. Consult a dps spreadsheet for exact weighting of hit, dmg, and crit for you.
3.) Generally, SSC/Tk is when the lack of affliction upgrades become apparent, and bolting specs come into their own.

Thanks a lot for the feedback and contribution!

I have some issues with the following statements though:

It's a great set for any warlock, regardless of spec. Demonologists and Destruction warlocks love spellpower too. I'll leave it in the middle.


In a starting raid group, especially if crit ratios are low and more dots are present, the ISB debuff is less likely to be overwritten. If it's not overwritten, then it boosts the next 4 hits by 20%, and all dots in between too. That's a sizeable damage bonus.

And I don't see how one single warlock can provide ISB uptime for the entire raid, so the concept of an ISB factory shouldn't be in the guide, in my opinion.


Everything else has been merged into the guide. Thanks!

The tailoring set (Frozen Shadoweave) lacks any of the other stats that 0/21/40 needs, mainly any hit or crit. The reason why the Tailoring set is so much better for affliction is because of the fact that you can hit cap your DoTs so easily and crit isn't as important of a stat in an affliction build. We love spellpower, but like you said yourself in the OP hit>haste>damage/crit.



This is one of the main reasons to have a destro lock. The biggest benefit of a destro lock to a raid is the increased ISB up-time. You sacrifice being able to have a pet out and all the other benefits of an affliction spec for more crit and more emphasis on SB spam for more ISB uptime. In addition to the raid benefit, your own damage will scale better with gear from later on in Hyjal/BT.

Points taken. I'm guessing my experiences in this matter (I used FSW 0/21/40 until BT, always been near top of damage meter) are coloring my views. Any suggestions as to how to improve it?

Well, what kind of gear did you have in your other slots? I would also guess that in Kara with Frozen Shadoweave you started off as an affliction spec, no?

Frozen shadowweave provides all the stats you need for affliction, to an almost absurd extent. It is possibly the most min-maxed itemization strategy I've ever seen on a set of gear. Socketed appropriately, it provides more spell damage than tier 5, and is available the moment you ding 70.

While it gives a good leg up to any spec due to it's early availablility, it is only the affliction playstyle that it truely fuels. As said before me, it does not give you the hit (and crit) you need so badly with 21/40.

In regards to ISB uptime:

SimulationCraft/ImprovedShadowBolt - Shadowpriest.com Wiki

One 21/40 warlock with 400 crit rating experiences virtually the same ISB uptime (0.64 vs 0.67) as five 21/40 warlocks with 200 crit rating.

All five warlocks upgrading from 200 crit rating to 300 crit rating brings the uptime from 0.67 to 0.73. A 50% increase in crit rating by FIVE members of the raid increases the total ISB uptime by less than 10%.

Also any look at a DPS spreadsheet will show crit rating providing 60-70% the benefit of spell damage, and maybe half the benefit of spell hit.

There is definitely more favorable DoT rotations than others. I think the most common or most widely agreed upon rotations are:

CoS/CoE/CoR:

CoS/CoE/CoR-->UA-->Corr-->Immo-->SL

CoA:

UA-->CoA-->Corr-->Immo-->SL

The problem with a DoT rotation like Curse --> UA --> Corr --> Immo --> SL is your UA, Corr, and Immo timer will sync up every time you refresh them (assuming no resist).
Ex. UA applied at the same time as Corr (1.5 sec GCD) Immo (1.5 cast). When Immo is applied both UA / Corr have 15 seconds on their durations.

A better rotation would be something like Curse --> UA --> Corr --> SL --> Immo.

I would say the rotation to avoid is UA -> Corr -> Immo. However, that does provide ease of maintenance because all three end, so you know you have to refresh all three at the same time.

Switching the rotations around works for a a little while, but given the 18 seconds of UA/Corr vs. 15 seconds of Immo, they are going to line up again anyway, and you'll lose uptime on Immo, most likely.

I'm playing around with dropping Immolate from my rotation (43/0/18 spec) because the DPCT is roughly equal to DPCT of Shadowbolt in our raids (no Fire mages right now, all Arcane). So I have an Immolate that only gets Misery to buff it, compared to a Shadowbolt with Shadow Mastery, Shadow Weaving, Maledicted CoS (from me), Misery, and potential ISB debuff (and maybe something else....I can't remember right now).

No, but it is so absurdly good that you can compensate for the lack of hit on your other gear, or get the socket bonus for +9 to hit on the set. +damage isn't exactly useless to a destruction warlock either, they get even more out of it than an affliction warlock does.


About ISB theory:

Unfortunately, I don't believe the ISB can be accurate measured by any spreadsheet, as the debuff application lags a LOT after the crit. When I wrote ShadowSeer to monitor it, I logged delays of 0.7s, sometimes up to 1.2 seconds. Good luck measuring that with a spreadsheet.

The debuff removal can also lag, resulting in extra hits being amped.

It also can't take into account how much dots are on the target (dots get amped too). I'll trust ShadowSeer over any spreadsheet, given how much the game mechanics differ from what they're supposed to do in theory. It's still beta, but I think the ISB data it gives me is reliable enough for analysis.

I really think you should put a 7/43/11 build up there its probably much better damage than the 0/41/20 and less down time and is good all around for PVE and PVP.

Can you be a bit more specific? I don't mind adding specs I'm not familiar with myself, but I'll need a lot more information than "7/43/11".

Also, I'm modeling raiding specs. PVP viability isn't really considered.

Oh I'm sorry Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft is probably the most popular maybe switching a few points. It provides great damage IF you can keep the pet alive and the instant corruption makes up for the lost crit from the 0/41/20 build

I think I got the idea.

I don't see how gaining 0.5 seconds on a spell that you cast once every 18 seconds will increase your damage over 5% crit, provided you have ISB. I'll add 1/40/19 to the list, though.

Instant corruptions is nice when pvping, but for raid scenario's, I doubt it's 5 talent points in a tree you're not specialising in.

The real gain is in Improved Lifetap. Improved Corruption helps too, but not as much as imp LT.

Good point. I can't tell whether it's worth it on the fly. Added.

I think you should add the PvP/PvE hybrid Demo spec, 7/44/10 Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
The gain of imp Life Tap is very high, since it means 20% fewer Life Taps.

Also add the note that 1 point in mana feed is enough to allow the Pet to spam Cleave for over 5 minutes.


For 21/40, you should add a comment about Fire destro Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft, saying it is a good spec if you don't have a shadow priest in the raid, and it is more mana efficient (although losing damage over shadow bolt even without a shadow priest around, due to Incinerate only getting 91.4% +damage added to it).

I would point out that for a single shadow lock ISB uptime is very easy to estimate using 1-(1-c)^4.

Expanding that out for a whole raid can be done relatively simply by weighting the crit rate of each member by his share of nukes on the target. Using this weighted crit rate in teh above expression will yield a pretty accurate reading for expected ISB uptime in raids and helps to estimate the gains of crit rating on items outside of personal DPS.

EDIT:
I would also add that more than most other classes (puuuure speculation) warlocks have a larger variance in their DPCT available to them at any point in time. For example, an affliction lock's DPCT over time varies depending on which DoTs he has active (and what procs/buffs/debuffs are going). Once all his dots are up, his DPCT drops since he's forced to use his lowest DPCT spell, shadow bolt. Saving LT/DP for those low-DPCT valleys, using pots when you have no mana but are in a high DPCT peak, and similar decisions will increase DPS quite a bit over time.

This is something I've put a lot of thought into while watching myself raid, and I've come to the conclusion that the biggest factor of evaluating CoA vs CoD for a damage-only basis (ignoring special stuff like say Curator) is the bossfight itself.

Due to the lost time, as you say, CoD beats CoA on it's own. However, that is assuming one is always casting when Curse of Agony needs a refresh.

Depending on bossfight, it can very well happen that at say 50% of the times when you'd need to cast CoA again, you're moving anyways, not casting shadow bolts. In those situations CoA's superior damage (and superior scaling I think, although this is off top of my head, no calculator at hand) can outdo CoD due to not actually losing much casting time at all.

Good point. I hadn't thought of that.

However
- The type of fight is rather rare
- Affliction locks probably have better things to cast
- You can also life tap (or dark pact) during movements instead. This is in fact what I usually do, as 0/21/40.
- And if you need to be moving that much, you might want to stick with CoD since it requires less attention, allowing you to focus on what you're running from in the first place
- the difference is marginal at best. Over a two minute duration you hit 2 CoD (8400+4*sp) or 5xCOA (5x1356+6*sp). For affliction warlocks with imp CoA it probably is better, since CoA gets 10% from Shadow Mastery and 10% from imp CoA.

I'll mention it in the guide.

Specific notes for common raiding thingies:
Darkmoon Card Crusade: Any spec, but especially affliction, has a really easy time keeping this stacked, and getting it stacked while the tank builds threat, because we have spammable low-cost low-agro long-range curses. It's often worth the time to debuff a target to keep the stack rolling.

Clicky Trinkets and affliction builds: Clicky trinkets should be saved for when all of your DoTs are going to be refreshed in a small window. If at all possible, on 20-second clickies, try to double-tip corruption and unstable affliction. It's worth saving the trinket for a few seconds, it probably won't cost you an extra activation.

Procs and DoTs: Recasting a DoT and overriding a previous one is never, ever worth it, no matter how awesome your proc is. You lose half a tick on average, and the damage gain from the amped DoT is not worth that half a tick. For example, 2pcT4 proc is 135 damage. Over the course of a corruption this comes out to 170ish before debuffs. The lost half-tick of corruption is 250 at that gear level. Ignore your procs, and keep casting as if nothing happened.
In a similar vein: while you want as close to 100% DoT uptime as you can manage, you want to absolutely avoid clipping DoTs, and also avoid waiting for DoTs finish. If a DoT is half a second out, cast a shadowbolt and refresh it late.
The exception is UA, and untalented corruption: it has a cast time. Remember this.

Finally, affliction builds actually do scale really well, it's just that they only scale with damage since crit is marginal and we hit-cap easily. Higher-end gear tends to spend a lot of itemization points on crit and haste, which help destruction far more. It's not exactly a matter of scaling, it's a matter of scaling with the itemization that we will actually encounter in higher raid settings.

And yeah, I hear enough about 0/40/21 that it should probably be mentioned. It plays essentially like a felguard build with a sexybus instead of a felguard, but it gears more for crit. Example spec(?):
WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Warlock -> Talent Calculator

As far as affliction builds go, I would list this:
WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Warlock -> Talent Calculator
as the absolute bare-bones affliction build, with most of the rest being determine by gear, playstyle, and raid group composition. You will note it's not a viable build: it requires fleshing out. I don't know how to make wowhead's talents do that.

After doing tons of test and theorycrafting and writing a complete addon to measure my damage, I've discovered that I've been downranking Immolate for about a year and a half now.

I must have forgotten to update the spell when I learned the AQ20 book. And because it wasn't top rank, it didn't get autoupdated when I learned the new max rank in TBC.

No wonder I always hated fire so much.


So uh... always use top rank of your dps spells.

Thanks for the useful posts, I'll merge them with the guide as soon as possible.

For those who raid with a pet out - Sporeling Snacks work on warlock pets (20 stam and spirit).

I'm not sure how long it's been like this as I've only tried felguard recently, but they get the same greater blessings as warriors. Worth knowing when you want to swap light for might, but keep kings for example.

In 2.3 there is a new food that gives 20 str/spirit to the pet that is a bit better than stam.

Hey. Ive got this problem. We had a fight with my guilds warlock CO cause of other warlocks performance. Ive noticed a 300-400 dps diference on single target encounters and asked whats the problem.

The answer was: "warlock 1 is in the tank group and he has raid buffing talents so you cant count his dps....... warlock2 is affliction till he ups his +hit, affliction is a pore dps raid bild i dont really want any in the guild. That leaves warlock 3 his gems dont go well with his gear then his spec sucks! ive told him what i want from him, if hes still dose nothing about it i an going to kick him................"

I dont believe that builds,group setup can make your dps get stuck at ~600, 700 at best while others in top 5 do ~900-1000 dps. Raid dps 9500-10000. ~12000 dps on hydross/morogrim. Their gear is about the same lvl as rest in guild.

builds
lock CO World of Warcraft Europe -> Talents

~maxet hit, ~19 crit, ~1270 spell damage

lock 1 (tank group) World of Warcraft Europe -> Talents

arround 936 spell damage, 15.44% to crit, 125 hit rating

lock 2 World of Warcraft Europe -> Talents

1010 shadowl damage, 141 hit rating, 15% crit chance

Lock 3 World of Warcraft Europe -> Talents

899 spell damage, 43 penetration, 54 hit rating (horrible i guess), 18.60% crit chance

The stats may be slightly diferent cause of grinding/raiding gear and stuff, none was wearing pvp gear though. Shouldnt be much diference id say.

Now can anyone confirm that the group setup or hit chance can be the reason of the huge dps diference? Or is it actualy slacking?

What would you suggest in such situation? If theres any kind person that would also want some more details i could pm reports and armory links.

Haste is 15.7 = 1%, right?
Curse of Recklessness, which bosses in BC have an ability based on melee damage?

First of all, Spell Damage is very misleading, I would very much rather have their Shadow Damage instead, but since I don't I'll just make a very rough analysis of what is going on here.


Going off the info you have posted:

The Warlock CO seems to have quite a gear advantage over the rest, even when accounting for Demonic Aegis. Capping hit is very important, and he has done well by capping it. As for his spec I am assuming is uses a Soul Linked Succubus to DPS? If so then his spec makes sense, otherwise I am not too sure, as I haven't heard of anyone using such a spec for anything other than Succy DPS (which is pretty decent damage).

Warlock 1: Firstly this warlock is probably always providing a utility curse instead of a damage one, using a damage one would net him an extra 100-150 DPS roughly. Secondly, if I were him i'd drop Imp. CoA (as he's always on CoS/CoE anyway) and put those 2 points into Soul Siphon, 10% threat reduction to affliction damage is nothing to be scoffed at. As for his gear, his hit is low, if he has any gems other than hit ones or ones that contribute towards a hit socket bonus then he should probably regem. His crit is a bit high for an affliction warlock at his gear level (i'm guessing pre-SSC mostly), so I suspect he's using either crit gems or is favoring crit heavy items over something far more useful to his spec, such as hit.

Warlock 2: His gear doesn't seem to be too good, he has very low spell damage and way too much crit for somone at his gear level, again, I am guessing he either has crit heavy items or the wrong gems, might want to consider getting some more hit either way. Looking at his talents, the affliction tree is fine, has some talents I wouldn't get but that is a matter of personal preference, he does have all the important ones and that is what matters. However, I would get Destructive Reach in Destruction if I were him, instead of putting 5 points into Demonic Embrace. Then again, I somehow doubt he is having threat issues with his gear setup (unless he has a *lot* more shadow damage than spell damage, which is possible), but if he does, then getting 10% less threat on his Shadowbolts/Immolates would help him output that bit more damage.

Warlock 3: Yeah, 18.6% crit as affliction, very low hit and spell penetration (proven to be a useless PvE talent, save for very few bosses such as Supremus, and a number of trash mobs) lead me to believe he really doesn't know what gear suits him best. Need more hit, ditch the crit unless it comes with a piece that is great otherwise, and no spell penetration other than the cloak enchant (20). As for his spec, it is good, it's a common malediction utility build, and you would want two Warlocks with malediction assuming your raid has its fair share of fire mages. And if he already is providing a utility curse most of the time, then that would account for ~100 dps he would have if he were on a damage curse.

As far as group setup, if none of the warlocks save the CO are getting a Shadow Priest/Elemental Shaman then I would say that could well contribute to the DPS difference, as well. However, they have other things to worry about right now, such as optimising their gear and specs in some cases.

I would also like to touch on the Warlock CO’s comment about Affliction being a horrible DPS spec and that he doesn't want any in the raid save the "utility warlock". At the gear level your guild is at (judging by your own gear and by your mention of early SSC fights as a basis of comparison) Affliction is definitely a more viable spec than Destruction, I personally was affliction till we first stepped into Mount Hyjal, and with the right itemization and dot uptime it is far from being a "poor DPS spec".

Double dipping on 20 second trinkets for both UA and Corruption is going to be quite difficult, since you have 1.5 seconds of UA cast + 18 seconds of dotting before the 2nd Corruption can be cast. It's almost impossible for me, even with /stopcasting. Hopefully, the changes in 2.3 to spell casting will alleviate this issue.

As far as affliction scaling and hit-capping....yes, it's difficult to scale beyond t5 content, since the gear moves toward crit and haste. However, we hit-cap just like any other warlock. Many people mistakenly count Suppression toward hit-capping. True, it helps your DoTs, which are a majority of your damage, but Shadowbolts are still a significant portion of an affliction lock's DPS.

As far as affliction wisdom goes, here's my experiences (43/0/18, 6/6 SSC, 3/4 TK):

I recently dropped Immolate from my rotation due to poor scaling and no raid synergy (all mages went arcane), and as a result, my Shadowbolt damage has increased it's percentage of my damage. My DPS increased slightly, probably due to less DoT uptime issues given the differing lengths of UA/Corr and Immo. I continue to use Siphon Life, as I'm nearly healer independent if I take no additional damage, however, it's generally a filler spell to get me to the end of a UA/Corr cycle, or cast while moving, provided I don't need mana.

I am still very competitive with my damage, despite being the Malediction lock, usually placing top 5 behind the arcane mages, the other affliction warlock, and occasionally a BM hunter. The additional 125-150 DPS from CoA would easily let me catch up, but the increased raid DPS is easily more than 125-150 when you consider we have 3-4 locks, 3 arcane mages, 2 shadow priests, and a boomkin. Unfortunately, the other locks vary from night to night (we have 5, and the two of us that are most consistent are me and the ISB Destro lock).

Lesson: Look carefully at your raid makeup and determine if Immolate is worth it. If it's close, test it both ways.

Updated: warlock 2 has 1010 shadow damage. Thanks anyway. Got the idea of what the problem is.

I don't see how stat allocation has anything to do with it, really.

In my opinion destruction warlocks gain more from +damage compared to affliction warlocks, due to their spammable spell getting a huge damage boost from it. Math to support that is at the end of the post. I know it's a bit hypothetical, but it's there to illustrate the point, not provide insurmountable proof.


Gear with high +damage and nothing else would also be used by destro's and would widen the gap. Incidentally, this is also why FSW is great for destro's too, provided they can obtain acceptable hit/crit on their other pieces.




-----

100 spelldamage extra will add, for an affliction lock:
Corruption: 100 * (0.94+0.12*3) * 1.05 * 1.1, due to emp corruption, Contagion, SM)
UA: 100 * 1.2 * 1.1 (SM)
Shadow Bolt: 100 * (3 / 3.5) * 1.1 (SM)

Or:

Corruption: 150 damage over 18 seconds, or 8,3dps
UA: 132 damage over 18 seconds, or 7,3 dps
Shadow Bolt: 94 damage per bolt.

Assuming a simplified 20 second rotation of UA/Corruption/SB/SB/SB/SB/SB/LT/DP you'd gain 150 from corruption, 132 from UA, and 5x94 from SB.

So a total gain of 753 damage over 20s or 38dps




for a destro lock (0/21/40), 100 spelldamage earns:

Shadow Bolt: 100 * (3 / 3.5 + 0.2) * 1.15 (SnF and DS)

Or:

Shadowbolt: 121.5 damage per bolt

Assuming something like SB/SB/SB/SB/LT, you'd gain 121.5*4=486 damage over 11.5s or 42dps.

This is assuming no crits and no CoD. Both of those are in favor of the destrolock anyway.

I am Destro, and I have to agree, pure +damage will help Destro at least as much as Affliction (you forgot Siphon Life in your calcs, which will add a few dps). I still use the FSW boots because they are just that good (if you are hit capped).

However, if Blizzard designed items with pure +damage (think Solarian's pants or Kael's 44 damage cloak), they aren't really that good compared to items that mix stats.

Note that if the item designers instead just use +shadow damage (the 53 shadow damage BT/Hyjal trash drop cloak or the Kara trash drop +shadow neck), then it comes out really good due to pure schools being much cheaper in the item budget.

I've seen from a lot of posts here that Curse of Doom isn't affected by Shadow Mastery? Can anyone give me an explanation as to why? Is it simply because of the 200% spell coefficient on Doom or what?

If Shadow Mastery does not affect it, then does the demo sacrifice Succubus 15% affect it?

Don't think anyone knows why it doesn't affect it. We could guess all day, but you'd have to ask blizzard to get a definite answer.

yes

I've got a question about Suppression and hit, I'm a little confused about the two. Say I have 5/5 supression and I've got 6% hit on my gear does this mean I've hit the hit cap for a warlock?

Only on your affliction school of spells, your still pretty gimped on your shadowbolts still.

Alright so bascially I should still try and stack hit on my gear and respec out of suppression when I've got the correct amount of hit?

That is more or less the idea.

Incinerate and Shadowbolt gain the same from spell damage in a standard raid environnment, the only differences are ISB vs better mana efficiency (and ISB > mana efficiency).

Base coefficients :
SB : 85.6%
Inci : 71.4%

In a desctruction build, both SB and Inci gain +20% from S&F, fire gets x110% from emberstorm. And in a standard raid environnment, SB gets x110% from shadow weaving, inci gets x115% from improved scorch.

SB : (85.6+20)*1.10 = 116,16
Inci : (71.4+20)*1.15*1.10 = 115.62

As Eph said a list of bosses where using CoR is (or isn't) suggested would be a nice addition to this raid compendium.

Good point. Anyone have information on that?

One thing I would like to see is the math of CoD vs CoS/E/R in a rading environment, as our warlocks are rather reluctant to put up anyone but CoS.

The only bosses we *don't* use CoR on in BT/Hyjal are the following:

Azgalor, Bloodboil, Essence of Suffering, Shahraz, Illidan

Azgalor - He already hits pretty damn hard.
Bloodboil - We already get crappy fel rage targets, don't really want to make it any worse.
Essence of Suffering - Need to make sure he hits Fixate targets for as little as possible.
Shahraz - Obvious reasons
Illidan - I'm not 100% sure if we should put it up there or not. We recently had a change of MTs, so we're not going to try it quite yet - but may soon.

These are the only bosses I can think of off the top of my head where we don't use CoR normally.



It's actually really easy to do this. For elements and shadows usually if there are 2+ members who will benefit from them they should be put up.

As for the math it's pretty simple. Take the DPS of CoD and compare it to the total increase of DPS the raid will get from CoE. (Ex. CoD DPS = 100. 2 fire mages who do 1000 dps overall = 1000x2x10% = 200 DPS.) That doesn't even take into account less partial resists for the mages as well.

You can do the same exact math for CoS as well.

For CoR it gets a bit trickier and depends on the mobs armor. Once you figure out the mob's armor you do the same thing as you do to calculate CoE.

For SSC/TK, we don't use CoR on the following bosses:

Hydross past 50% aura (I alternate between CoW and CoR)
Morogrim (though a druid MT seems to handle it fine)
Tidalvess (WF totem + CoR = bad news)
Al'ar phase 2 (missed taunt on melt armor = bad news)

We're still working on Kael, but CoR should be ok on all of the adds as well as Kael himself. I'd avoid CoR on the Kael trash that does the Arcane Flurry, as I like to use fear to interrupt that spell (though rogues have been getting better about gouging it).

For T4, I wouldn't use CoR on HKM or Mags unless your MT can take those nasty Cleave/Melee combos without much issue. CoR is bad news on Gruul past 7-8 grows.

EDIT: If we only have two warlocks, we usually prioritize CoS and then CoR. This is because there tends to be more shadow/arcane users in the raid (warlocks, spriests, moonkin, and arc mages) and physical DPS (rogues, hunters, warriors, feral druids, enh shaman, and ret pallies). Fire/frost users are exclusively mages and it's rare for us to have more than 2-3.

CoR on Morogrim is fine, we do it all the time as do most raids (from my research going through other WWS parses). His damage output is increased slightly, and since it's just white attacks, it's pretty trivial.

CoR on Al'ar is fine, a hit on melt armor with CoR is roughly 700 damage more. Just be ready for it and you'll be alright. Al'ar dying faster = less meteors, less birds, and less chances for mistakes.

CoR on Tidalvess is fine too, it's a trivial amount of damage increase, it's just a bigger series, all mitigated.

The thing to remember about CoR is that it just effects the base AP, if it's not multiplied by anything (like cleave, or enrage, etc), then it's going to be fine.

CoR on everything that doesn't have a special attack pretty much, or if your melee DPS really isn't touching the mob.

For CoR, I use it on all bosses except Azgalor (due to silence, and the imp demo shout guy is tanking the demons) and Bloodboil (I use it most of the time, just remove during Fel Rage).

Everything else gets Recklessness, because with imp Demo Shout the attack power gain is very small.

81.92 Int = 1% crit.

Stat values in comparison to each other:
Probably specify that dmg>crit for destruction.
Also from my tinkering with the spreadsheet, 1 haste isn't quite worth 1 dmg (1:0.97) this may just be for my specific gear and spec though, but I'd like to do/see some more concrete math on it, especially with the load of new haste items in 2.3.
And perhaps we should add a little more detail to our stat comparisons similar to how the rouge guide did it:
This will differ between the three trees and a difference between t4 level and t6 level, but I think this is an area where a lot of warlocks over/under compensate.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but our values vary widely by spec, given the relative crit of each build, as well as the larger emphasis on Stamina for Demo locks. The weighting to +hit and +crit also is impacted by our +dmg. About the best we have right now is the "Next Stat Value" section in Leulier's spreadsheet (linked in the original post).

Attack Power is quite linear and easy to model (from discussions I've had with a feral druid friend), whereas caster stats are very much interdependent.


Also, for CoR modeling, here's the posts you need:

Boss Armor: [RAID] Boss armor values
CoR benefit: http://elitistjerks.com/498690-post35.html

These assume both Sunder and Faerie Fire are already up, so the increase is 5.69% (7700 armor bosses) or 6.36% (6200 armor bosses).

So, if PhysicalDPS * CoR_Reduction > CurseOfDoomDPS, do CoR on appropriate bosses.

Given a 10k Curse of Doom, here's the calculation to determine if physical DPS is high enough:

10000 / 60 = 166.66 DPS for CoD.
166.66 / .0569 = PhysicalDPS = 2929.115 on the higher armor bosses. For lower armor, same calculation, but .0636:
10000 / 60 / .0636 = 2620.545 Physical DPS

Even simpler, here's what you multiply CoD by to find the required physical DPS:

7700 armor: multiply CoD damage by .2929115 (or .293 to be easy)
6200 armor: multiply CoD damage by .2620545 (or .262 to be easy)

If physical DPS is higher than the result, use CoR. If not...go ahead with CoD, and your raid probably has more issues than CoD vs. CoR.

True the best thing is the spreadsheet, maybe just make note emphasizing its use to determine gear choices. I guess I was originally thinking of making a sample gear set around the t4 range and another at the t6 range, going through the three main trees and writing out the values but I don't know how useful or accurate that would be.

The original poster is right, stats are weighted differently across specs and gear levels. They even differ with raid setup and per encounter. Being hit capped is very nice against bosses, but a huge waste for the majority of Hyjal, for example.

I wrote ShadowSeer to do just that: determine my personal benefit from each rating.

Example here.

Thats a great mod and it seems very helpful. Is it available for download?

It's linked at the bottom of the first post. And yes, that does look like a great way to calculate stat values.

Further to the 'raiding demo lock' discussion heres a quick question - do Felguards benefit from Windfury, or any other synergy related effects/abilities other than SPs? i know they can get battleshout, but with that group perpetually made up of rogues and hunters its not one i as a demo lock am going to break into anytime soon.

They benefit from all group-wide buffs, like LOTP, BS and Ferocius Inspiration. Can't comment on WF as we rarely have a shaman, and when we do he naturally goes with the melee.

For the short time I've tried Felguard spec, I was usually in a hunter, hunter, feral group. Not optimal, but can't complain about double FI for both the lock and the pet.

Just a few more notes on 40/21 since it's still sparse. Here are a few tips:

1.) You really need to get into a group with a shadow priest, even if that means losing totems
2.) At least until void star talisman (which I still havn't gotten), I found it necessary to give up 2% crit out of demonic tactics in order to get 3/3 demonic resilience and 3/3 fel stamina
3.) Bind "pet attack" to an easy hot key, as well as "pet follow" which ends up being called "special action bar X" where X is which icon the "pet follow" command is on. being able to pull your pet in and out of whirlwinds, spore quakes, etc is key

Windfury - no. It's a totem that applies a weapon buff - FGs don't have "gear" per say like players.

Strength of earth totem, ILoTP, battle shout, etc; basically any direct buff will effect your pet. And quite nicely too.

Thanks for that. Regarding Felguards and Shadow priests, it seems to me that with 2/3 Mana Feed and T2 set bonus you have basically removed the need for a SP, and it would thus benefit you more to join a melee group. Seeing as you essentially bring nothing to the melee however, you can basically forget it.

With 2/3 Mana Feed and T2 2-set bonus, the only really important synergy to obtain is the oomkins 3% crit aura. An SP is no more than a safety net for the more intractable boss fights.

For those of you interested in demo raiding, my profile link below will take you to what imo is the optimal raiding demo spec.

With 1 point in Mana Feed I've never seen the Felguard run oom. I'd rather shuffle some points around to get Intensity. Spell pushback can be quite annoying, especially when using /stopcasting.

As far as Demonology builds go, I can't really see anything being better than 7/44/10 honestly. Once you pickup 2 pieces of T5 + Void Star Talisman, the build is just incredibly fun and outputs a shitload of DPS. I pretty regularly pull 1300+ combined DPS, assuming the fight doesn't completely shutdown my Felguard. There aren't very many fights where I can't use him anymore. Watering down a Felguard build with Devestation and losing 2/2 LT and instant Corruption is a really bad idea IMO. Without Ruin and generally because Demo Warlocks prefer everything else (Hit, Haste, Spellpower) > crit, it's really underwhelming.

Hmm disagreeing with you Vazu. I raid with a build 1/43/17 ( or 1/41/19 should I need instant such as shadowburn for a few fights like vashj) and I don't really see what instant corruption will bring to you ( gcd powa) over 1 point in corruption, nor do I see the DPS power of improved LT ( do have a SP all the time tho so maybe I m biased here). Seems to me its a lot of wasted points especially considering that crit certainely isn't useless as you will proc more ISB the more crit you have.

That said on a fight where my felguard isn't shutdown and can dps most of the time or even all the time ( about everything in ssc/tk), I m running at 1400, sometimes 1500 + dps depending on the dps time.Don't have any T6 yet, we're on kael.

You forgot some stuff. Comparative damage gains from each point of +dmg.
Incinerate: SnF, Sac, Emberstorm, Scorch, Misery, talented CoE.
1.578 per +dmg
Shadow Bolt: SnF, Sac, Weaving, Misery, talented CoS
1.587 per +dmg, with 0% ISB uptime; 60% uptime pushes Sbolt to 1.777. That's a significant difference.
As you said, ISB > mana efficiency, and Sbolt scales quite a bit better as it is. In addition, shadow gets increased bonus from CoD and Corruption, if it's used.

I don't think those were forgotten, it's just that those are multiplicative. Misery, for example will affect both the same. With Imp Scorch up (rare until 2.3) SB and Incinerate scale equally. It's just ISB that makes the difference. But ISB is decisive, really. Of course, if you're the only shadow user and have no shadow priest, it might be worth it.

Yeah, try raiding nearly 100% of the time w/o a shadow Priest in your group. We always give them to Mages, then Hunters and healers leftover mixed into those groups. So I'd say yeah, it's pretty unfair to assume raiding w/o 2/2 Imp. LT is good unless you are guaranteed to have a shadow Priest. It's hard to deny how an additional 300+ mana/tap wouldn't contribute to your long-term DPS. I mean, there's just no arguement there if you don't have a mana battery.

In regards to cast cycle, it seems taken for granted that immolate should be included. I am not stating that it should not be included, but in regards to an afflicition lock, I'm wondering if with the correct spell crit and desparity between shadow and fire damage that it would be better to cast another sb, even if it takes another second to cast. The reason I ask this is two fold. First, sb has much better damage coefficients than immolate. Second, when sb crits you get ISB effect as well as overall a lot more damage than if the initial immo blast crits. Especially when starting out with the fsw set, it is not uncommon to have 200+ more shadow damage than fire. I'm wondering if anyone has had some experience with the math behind this. This question is from the persepective of one beginning raids, but I'm much intrigued by the theory crafting I have seen so far, and it seems to be a lot of fun.

Ignoring the PvP reasons for instant spells, having an instant gives you a chance to move a little bit without a dps penatly. With with a Shadow Priest (which I never get), I would still get imp Life Tap because it still means 20% less life taps, which is more dps time.

You aren't gaining much from 5% to crit in addition you only need 1 point in Mana Feed, FG gets 1 spirit tic between Cleaves. However, once you are in Black Temple the boss RoS on Phase 2 and 3 does damage to everyone, so the 70% less interruption talent would be helpful, although not required.

The answer: it depends. At high crit rates, Shadow Bolt tends to be more dps. Unfortunately, ISB coefficients vary a lot from fight to fight. I'm destro with BT gear, with no fire mages, but always Shadow Priests, and I get 15% bonus to shadow damage to DS. Still, on most occasions Immolate seems worth casting from damage-per-casting-time perspective.

I mostly use it right after the pull, before solid aggro has been established. No really high crit SB at the start that way ,and the Priest Shadow Weaving hasn't kicked in fully yet either, at that point.

But with _everything_ (talents, gear quality and setup and raid setup) in favor of SB, it's still only marginally better. Under most circumstances, Immolate will just be preferable.

You might want to try ShadowSeer to run the numbers for you, though. It does calculate damage-per-casting-time, and takes all talents including ISB and the combined immolate-hit+dot into account.

The problems I seem to be having with the FG build atm are that I do not have two piece t5 so he dies a lot since our healers dont heal him much or at all some times. Also I have to beg for buffs for my pet which gets old and pretty much just pisses me off by the end of the night. Also since I dont have any aggro reduction talents I draw a lot of aggro (not pull) so I have to be careful. I had a hell of a time on Al'ar lastnight, it was my first time doing it and my FG died too many times.

I would have to disagree with this. An extra 5% to crit is a huge dps boost by itself, giving you much more than you could output with the extra time from imp. life tap. THEN when you include the increase in proc from imp. SB youve just increased your dps exponentially.

There's other things to consider. For instance you have Shiffar's Nexus Horn equipped currently in your armory, I'm not sure if that's part of your raiding gear but if it is your gear will favor crit over instant corruption.

I'm using an MSD and because of that putting corruption down to an instant cast helps insure I don't lose dps time due to altering my casting rotation to maximize focus procs.

Generally though, I do agree that 1/43/17 and close variants are the *best* felguard raiding spec. Even though we don't gain nearly as much from crit as a ruin 'lock would the raid still sees more ISB time which leads to more raid dps overall.

On paper however, with static variables (read taking a spreadsheet which assumes a base ISB uptime regardless of your own crit rating or talents) I'm pretty sure imp. lifetap pulled ahead of the crit talents by a fair margin. Again though this assumes static variables and doesn't take into account things such as how much ISB uptime you add by increasing your own crit, nor the possibility of being grouped with a shadow priest.

On a personal note I'm either going to respec full destruction once the MSD nerf goes live or to 1/43/17. Not sure yet though if I'll be gemming the new crit meta or an old school spell damage one but either way I'll be dropping MSD. The nerf back to six seconds of focus time plus the internal cooldown addition doesn't make it worth the gemming requirements at my current gear level.

One build I dont see here is the 30/21/10 succy sac hybrid build. Its a very good and viable raid build that puts out good numbers.

Theorycraft/Caster DPS Comparison - Shadowpriest.com Wiki

Someone brings up that stupid build every week and thinks it's good. It may look good on paper but its pretty terrible. No ruin, no shadowburn, no pet...what's the point? Its DPS sucks and is horrible to play.

If someone specs that they are pretty dumb.

Btw I can't find a character with your name on Armory or anyone in your guild with that name, do you even play a warlock?

As daunting as that 80+ page warlock thread is, people really *should* take the time to read the damn thing. Even if you read at a 3rd grade level, it shouldn't take more than 20 minutes to glance through the larger post by some of the more seasoned posters. Hell, even the summary posts inside that thread are a good starting place.

In short, if you're going to post something, have something worth posting.

In order to determine if you have something worth saying, you need to get yourself up to speed.

It also helps, as Rochan pointed out, to have a fucking working profile.

how about cooling off some ? I don't think EJ needs to turn into fohguild.org....

WOW you are a pretty angry little person. So if the build didnt work for you and you found it hard to play then it must be horrible I guess. So when you specced into that build were you dumb in doing so?

Looks good on paper can be said for pretty much all the builds, aggro issues, movement during fights, being incapacitated during an encounter are just some of the things a spreadsheet cant accurately account for.

Funny you list no pet as a complaint for this build when you are running 0/21/40, dont you sac the succy too?

BTW I do play a warlock, do you?

He has a good reason to be angry, that spec has been brought up in the warlock thread numerous times and everytime it's been proven as a bad spec compared to the others. If you had read the thread and kept up with it you would have known this and never had asked the question in the first place.

Compared to a 41+/0/18+ build you lose 5% crit of SB and UA + pet utility / malediction / shadow embrace

Compared to a 0/21/40 build you lose ISB Uptime / 8% crit

Compared to a 7/43/11 build or any variant of you lose either 5 or 10% crit / more ISB uptime. You'll also miss out on a little bit of more spell damage / damage increase from MD/SL. (depending on the fight of course) It's also a very versatile spec.

On each of these builds, you provide more benefit to the raid via pet utility or more ISB uptime. With a 30/21/10 build you really don't provide much to the raid. Especially since the build does less damage than a destruction or affliction build.

Thank you for the calm response Arveene. I have kept up with the threads and I have also kept up with Warlocks who do run this build and have seen their WSS logs.

Again on paper I will not argue those other builds sometimes appear better but in practice they may not. I mean if I can sit there an spam bolts with a 0/21/40 build without aggro issues, without ever being interrupted sure its most likely a better build. But the encounters are too dynamic with too many variables that a spreadsheet cant account for. I certianly dont see it as the best build of all time or anything like that but I do see it as a decent good DPS build with a wider play style than full affliction or destro.

I did post a link with information and if I was at home I could post other comparisons that show this build as dps viable (not complete crap as some are making out to be). Its not like I just posted the question and had nothing to atleast back up the numbers some what. But I guess we can agree to disagree.

Deep breaths, people.

Let 30/21/10 die.

Let's argue about 40/0/21 instead.

In addition to this you lose pretty much all the utility of deep affliction builds and gain really nothing in return except straight damage.

30/21/10 looks really neat on paper, all that stacking of shadow damage, but what it really boils down to is this.

No pet, no malediction, no soul link for warlock tanking, most likely only 1 point in SE if any, terrible crit, nearly as much debuff space used as a full affliction 'lock, high aggro generation, and a casting rotation that relies on dot casts thus furthering the gap between itself and the other 'petless' build 0/21/40 when it comes to ISB uptime.

Of the two petless builds 0/21/40 gives more back to the raid and all you really see in return is a build that does what affliction does but with less utility. It may do slightly more damage but is that trade off really worth it when it comes to raiding?

Keep in mind the title of this thread before responding to that question.

No one is saying 30/21/10 will put you down with the tank on DPS. The point is that (as Krathis points out) it brings zero benefits to the raid. I'm fine with classes bringing zero buffs to raids so long as they put out enough DPS to make up for it. The problem with 30/21/10 is that it's "viable" in terms of DPS. You'll probably beat some mages and hunters, but it just doesn't have the same multipliers coming out of the talents as 21/40 (the closest raid-role a lock can take to 30/21/10).

SnF ends up adding as much DPS as Shadow Mastery once a certain gear level is achieved. Then you toss in Ruin, 8% more crit (which, let alone personal DPS, helps the rest of the raid) and destruction-spell threat reduction. In the face of that, 30 in affliction brings instant, empowered corruptions, a better life tap and affliction-spell threat reduction.

In short, it doesn't bring the same raid-buffs to the table as 21/40, in most cases will do the same or less damage, and scales worse if given Shaman/SP/Moonkin buffs. If I were a raid leader I'd have to wonder...

ISB modeling is all wrong in the source you mentioned. It doesn't take into account dots on the target. ISB ups ALL Shadow damage for it's duration. Not just the next 4 bolts.

Also, you'll find my opinion here:

http://elitistjerks.com/506250-post2109.html

Although I might be wrong about Immolate (I had it downranked at the time, severely skewing my data on it). Either way, losing 8% crit and ruin and SnF to get imp lifetap, emp corruption and shadow mastery is obviously not the way to go.


And please, people, let's stay polite. We're trying to construct a resource. No need to get personal, it detracts from the goal.

The attitude is certainly uncalled for, let's please keep this civil.

There's one aspect of 29/21/10 + 1 that I think people fail to consider. It combines the 'survival' talents of the lower demo tree (DE, imp HS, Fel Stam, DA) with a small part of the self-sufficiency talents of the affliction tree (at least siphon life for self-healing that comes with +25% shadow damage) while maintaining solid personal DPS (not the best but certainly up there).

I think it's easy to forget that 0/21/40 and X/41/XX are very healing-intensive builds. On the other side, the standard deep affliction build misses the early demo talents which results in a non-trivial health pool hit (even running with an imp). For a young raiding guild or a still undergeared lock, the 29/21/10+1 may be a good way to provide damage without putting stress on the healers and maintaining a pretty beefy health-pool.

Yes, it's situational but might be a good fit for the right person in the right situation. In fact, I'd be interested in seeing the dps difference between 30/21/10 and 41/5/11+4 for early raiding gear levels.

Just because a build isn't good for your situation doesn't mean it's a bad build.

Good point, I had overlooked that.

But Affliction does not really have survivability issues, due to high mobility, Dark Pact, Siphon Life, Blood Pact and if necessary Drain Life.

Neither does Destro, due to the 21 points demonology.

The self sufficiency point is valid. No doubt about that. Especially for starting guilds, having to heal warlocks that have been tapping might put a strain on undergeared healers.

However, the build is undeniable much worse in terms of dps versus 0/21/40. Losing 8%crit AND Ruin AND SnF(vsSM) for increased personal self-sufficiency is harsh. Especially if survivability is an issue, because you don't have an imp out. Blood Pact will boost hp pools of classes that actually do have issues with staying alive at low gear levels (Mooncloth Set being the prime example).

Not to mention beginning groups actually need high dps from dps classes more than anything. Just compensate with healthstones, healing/mana/rejuv pots, and if push comes to shove, bandage/drain life. Or ditch the 30/21/10 guy and replace him with a healer. As long as you don't tap too aggressively you'll get hots or other mana efficient heals anyway, by a raid healer. If you're concerned about self-sustainability, FSW or Soul Leech will help mitigate the problem.

The builds in the Compendium aren't set in stone, the compendium itself mentions that. By design, it mentions standard builds and explains their strengths and weaknesses, giving reasonable alternatives. This spec has too limited use to warrant its inclusion, in my opinion.

Imp SB can only increase total shadow dps by 20%, ever*. The only exponential behaviour would be a psuedo exponential decay of the relative increase in ISB uptime relative to increasing crit rates.

WPUATOUOE(Wow players united against the over use of exponential)

*Feeding extra mana to spriests isn't going to create an exponential gain its just going to mean less mana consumables needed to achieve full burn and the full burn situation is still the upper bound for caster dps.

Does anyone have a link to anything conclusive that proves that CoD is not affected by SM? If it is indeed not, shouldn't this be a bug that Blizzard should fix? It seems kind of silly, and the first time I have seen this noted was on this site, although I did notice that doom seems to hit harder in my 0/21/40 build unamped.

Shouldn't be hard to find out. max rank CoD hits for 4200 + 200% * spellpower. It should take exactly one minute for a SM warlock to find out whether it's affected.

I realize there's a trinket simulation based on spec, but I'm curious to hear feedback from players who have the Ashtongue Talisman of Shadows. In a couple of weeks, I should have it. Which will give me access the following trinkets to rotate in/out.

Ashtongue Talisman of Shadows
Void Star Talisman
Darkmoon Card: Crusade
Icon of the Silver Crescent

Assuming I can keep 10x Crusade up, it always gets a trinket spot. Depending on the resists involved, I may or may not use VST as my second trinket with a Felguard out. The question is, for a single target burn encounter, would ATS be better than the Icon? I'm not concerned with anything 2+ targets. I know the ATS is better in that situation, assuming it has no internal cooldown. But everything I've ready has the both of them very close for single target encounters.

It is very easy to test. Just remove all your items, to have 0 +dmg, and CoD+fear a mob. If it does 4200 dmg, it is not affected by SM, if it does 4620, then it is. I tested this somewhere around the 2007/05/26, to correct my spreadsheet and SM does not affect CoD.

There's no mention of Siphon Life in the Affliction section. Its damage per cast time is pretty high; is there any reason not to cast this?

(I realise it takes a load off your healers, I just mean in pure dps terms).

That would depend. Its base damage is 630 + spellpower over 30 seconds. Casting time is 1.5seconds. It's affected by SM. So it's damage-per-second-cast-time is (630+sp)*1,1 / 1,5s.

It's probably worth keeping in the rotation for the life drain, but it doesn't seem exceptionally good damage, on first glance. Far below other dots for dpsct, but better than Shadow Bolt.

30 second duration is long, though. Losing tics will make it worth less, so only worth it if your target is going to live for 30 seconds.

You can test for yourself using Leulier's spreadsheet for theorethical values, or ShadowSeer for some recorded data.

Affliction has good survivability but comes with a smaller health pool.. this can be bad in fights with large damage spikes. The classic example for a starting raider that I'm thinking of is a bad shatter on Gruul.

Destro can survive large damage spikes but has crap for personal healing and self-sufficiency.

Is this sarcasm or a typo?

I agree with most of this.. but if you're 0/21/40 and you have to DL/bandage to get your mana your dps will suck compared to any build with siphon life for that extra bit of self-sufficiency.

FSW is such a minor offset, I admit that it's something but it's a far cry from self-sufficiency. Soul leech has two problems.. 1, there's no way that it covers the health needed to self-sufficiently output the high dps of 0/21/40.. 2, you can only get health back from soul leech while standing still and casting (if there's any movement in a fight, you won't get any healing during that movement).

So I decided to put the build to the test using leulier's spreadsheet. I picked some reasonable figures for low gear levels.. 900 shadow damage, 10% crit, 16% spell hit before talents.

946 dps with 0/21/40, -5000 hp/min
953 dps with 43/0/18, +2200 hp/min
969 dps with 30/21/10, -700 hp/min

For reference, at these dps figures the value of FSW healing is about 1000 hp/min.

30/21/10 doesn't come out all that bad.. top damage, almost self-sufficient (it is SS with FSW), and a big health pool. I would personally take deep affliction with a few sacrificed points for the extra utility, but I really can't say that 30/21/10 is a useless build in this context.

If someone actually plays and enjoys 30/21/10 I congratulate them for being able to play a spec with absolutely no fun or helpful aspects. No UA, Malediction, Shadow Embrace, Dark Pact, Ruin, extra crit, Shadowburn, SnF, pet, gimped SB range. It's basically like playing a mage :P Not to mention if you have a lot of warlocks/spriests you won't even cast siphon life due to debuff limits.

You do OK damage and are of no help to the raid.

Sorry duplicated post, please remove.i'll try to add some positive feedback to the current discussion. Sorry again.

The biggest survival talent for 30/21/10 in the demo tree is DE. DA is nice, as are the other talents you mentioned, but with all the self-sufficiency talents from affliction the biggest concern would be spike damage.

41/5/15 offers more utility and still gives you DE. Also you end up with dark pact which is a better survival talent then any of the early demonology talents (except possibly DE) in my opinion because you life tap less, meaning your health pool is topped off more often, in addition to this you'll almost always be using an imp which gives you another 700 hp or so to deal with spike damage.

As far as the early raiding gear comparison, I ran some numbers through Leulier's spreadsheet using the following, 900 shadow and fire damage, 12% base crit, and 6% hit rating. Used the base spread sheet assumptions of 60% ISB uptime, 1.13 CoS, 1.1 CoE, full scorch stack, misery, and full shadow weaving.

30/21/10 - 903 dps (-14.81 hp/s) (Note 30 more spell damage because of DA)
41/5/15 - 895 dps (+32.71 hp/s) (Note this build has 4% more crit because of devastation)
21/0/40 - 871 dps (-21.8 hp/s) (Note this build has 8% more crit because of devastation and backlash)
0/21/40 - 906 dps (-111.62 hp/s) (Note this build has 8% more crit because of devastation and backlash, and 30 more spell damage because of DA)

And some comparisons at 1200 shadow and fire damage, 16% base crit, and 13% hit. Going to leave out the notes on adjusted crit and spell damage for talents on this one but they'll be in the calculations.

30/21/10 - 1180 dps (+8.07 hp/s)
41/5/15 - 1155 dps (+51.48 hp/s)
21/0/40 - 1248 dps (+16.78 hp/s) (Note that the math here has been double checked and proven to be wrong, best I could reproduce for this spec was about 1180 dps with a similar hp/s)
0/21/40 - 1215 dps (-103.14 hp/s)

Conclusion, 30/21/10 scales better then UA builds but doesn't match the efficiency of dark pact. Granted it's drain life is more beefy thus allowing you to recover from spike damage faster then a UA build would.

Rather or not the 8 dps gain at early gear levels or the 25 dps gain at later gear levels is worth the trade off in ISB uptime or possibly losing malediction (keep in mind all these numbers use shadow malediction in the calculations) we can debate all day but there's the numbers for anyone that was curious.

*edit* Something I forgot to mention in these number comparisons is that every spec was put on curse of elements. Given that running a damage curse over a debuff curse would be an option the spec that would gain the most would be 30/21/10, followed by 0/21/40, 41/5/15, and 21/0/40. All sac builds used a succubus sacrifice, all casting rotations where for optimal damage allowance according to the spreadsheet except life tap which was simply left 'as needed', the filler spell was shadow bolt for every spec, and no pet damage was used in any comparison.

It's probably worth mentioning that if you raid with four warlocks 30/21/10 could produce some pretty good numbers. For one you'd have three other warlocks helping to maintaining ISB, you'd have three other warlocks to take care of curse of elements, shadows, and recklessness leaving you open to using doom or agony, and most likely you'd have at least one affliction warlock maintaining SE and/or Malediction. Debuff space however could be an issue especially if more then one of the other 'locks was affliction and more then one shadow priest was in the raid.

These are all good comparisons as are the ones done by IDK. All of which shows the point I was trying to make earlier, which is 30/21/10 is not complete crap as some try to make it out to be and SHOULD be included in as a hybrid build especially if you already have other locks filling the support roles.

I'll state this again, non of the spreadsheets account for the intangibles of each encounter. Movement, incapacitation/silencing effects, having to pick up CoR/CoS/CoEl if that lock dies and everything else thats not tank and spank without aggro issues. Its just like the old SM/Ruin build pre BC, not the best at one particular thing but just a good all around versatile build.

Instead of getting personal opinions about who likes and dislikes the 30/21/10 playstyle, why don't we put an entry in the first post with a brief explanation about it.. the pros, the cons.. the few cases where it shines and the reasons why you should probably pick another spec. Now that we've had an intelligent discussion about it and looked at it from both sides we should have enough info to fill out a front page entry.

If you do that you won't have people asking once a week about it.

An entry in the first post concerning 21/0/40 may be warranted too. While it doesn't scale quite so well with crit rating as 0/21/40 and uses more debuff space it showed to be a pretty solid build both in dps and self-sufficiency at later gear levels according to the spreadsheet. It also offers a more versatile play style because of it's combination of dot damage and high damage shadow bolts while maintaining blood pact for your group.

Something I forgot to mention in my comparison above was that all the builds where assumed to be using a debuff curse as opposed to a damage curse. I'm going to edit it to include that information and point out which specs gain the most from being on a damage curse.

You're right.

Adding.


Oh, by the way, the remark about healing warlocks that didn't take damage was not intended to be sarcastic. I was trying to make the distinction between "paying life" (life tap/hellfire/soulshatter) and "taking damage" (everything else). I'll update the original post.

About self sufficience: FSW used to heal me for about half of what Soul Leech brought. I'm not using it any more, though.

My point is that Destro can be self sustainable through consumables, FSW (which every starting warlock can use, regardless of spec) and Soul Leech. If it wants to. There's no need in most fights. Almost every fight has a pocket where you're stable and you can easily get some hots thrown to you. I typically try to be at 80-90% health at all times so I can benefit from Soul Leech procs. When I get a hot thrown, I'll tap to make it last the full duration.


For reference: http://wowwebstats.com/5upyasekfvthq?s=553-1580&a=7 a WWS from Kael'thas. (18 minute fight)

I'm using 0/21/40, with two poins in Soul Leech.

Soul Leech heals me for about 25k. (1200 per minute)
I used 41 lifetaps during the Kael'thas fight for a total of 67k health.

For comparison, hypothetical gains from FSW - 2% * 580k * 1.26 is roughly 14k.
For comparison, hypothetical gains from spamming rejuv pots: 9x4600 is roughly 42k

So if I spam potions, I can do the entire fight being self sufficient. That's not counting healthstones. And this is for a 18 minute fight, with no shaman or spriest.

Soul Leech will obviously not work for damage spikes while moving. In fact, it won't work against damage spikes at all. But Siphon Life or Imp Life Tap won't help much there either. Spike damage requires healing (or pots, or stones). I was arguing about self sufficiency over a large period of time. Fights where large damage spikes are an issue will favor Affliction anyway, since they have Blood Pact.

FSW at my gear level is 14k over 18 minutes. I'd say 400-600 per minute might be a more realistic average for starting raid comms.

Bringing consumables into the equation helps 30/21/10 more than it helps 0/21/40 _in this situation_. Consumables are used for the destro spec to maintain self-sufficiency when heals are limited.. a self-sufficient spec like 30/21/10 or 41/X/X can use those potion cooldowns to increase dps instead (whether it's mana pots or destruction pots).

Maybe this is true for your party, it's not true for an individual warlock. Blood pact is worth 660 hp untalented. You only need 4401 hp from stamina before demonic embrace provides more hp than blood pact. At even starting raid gear levels, DE is going to be much more improvement for your health pool than blood pact.

In spite of this, I'd still rather be taking spike damage as affliction (with or without DE) over 0/21/40. Not just because you have an imp out but because dark pact and siphon life means you'll be at full life more often and affliction builds (rather full or some sort of hybrid) will recover from that damage much faster in any situation where a healer won't or can't top you off.

This of course assumes just random spike damage as opposed to constant spike damage such as warlock tanking. In which case I'd take 0/21/40 over any affliction build that didn't include at least DE.

Agreed.

Umm, i have to question the math, or talent input or something you did here. I wondered how 21/0/40 could possibly beat 0/21/40 on the strength of empowered corruption alone, while losing 15% shadow damage and 30 spell damage so i grabbed a spreadsheet to do the math. I show 0/21/40 at least 60-70 DPS ahead of 21/0/40. This is using both nenad's, and liuleirs spreadsheet. Even using the best case scenario for 21/0/40, and the worst case for 0/21/40 shows 0/21/40 ahead. What did you do exactly?

As far as the 30/21/10 discussion goes, its undeniably decent enough DPS. It simply brings close to 0 utility that isn't trumped by other builds to the raid so its not seen much. Kind of a jack of all trades, but master of none.

You're forgetting imp lifetap. It's not _just_ empowered corruption. Imp Lifetap means 16% less time spent lifetapping.

Not that it makes your point less valid.
There is no way it can keep up with a bolting spec, with Shadowbolts that hit for less and crit 8% less. It loses in straight dps vs destro, it doesn't get any of the support things the other specs do (Malediction, -5% damage, blood pact for affliction, high ISB uptime for destro). The _only_ upside is that you require less healing.

I had imp lifetap and nightfall accounted for too, i should have mentioned that. It just blew me away that he showed 21/0/40 ahead at all, so i checked.

Hmm... I double checked everything today and came up with way different numbers on both these specs.

Got 1194 at +4.89 hp/s for 21/0/40 and 1245 at -93 hp/s for 0/21/40. I'm questioning rather or not open office reads the spreadsheet correctly but did manage to reproduce at least the dps on both these specs by opening and closing the program and reentering the data (though the hp/s came out way different on the 21/0/40 build the second time around).

Not saying human error couldn't have accounted for the original mistake but I've seen some odd behavior from the spreadsheet with open office so it does have me wondering.

Are you referring to 21/0/40 here or 30/21/10? Because 21/0/40 (which I'm goofing around with right now for the weekend to see how well it works) has the same crit rating as 0/21/40 as well as blood pact.

The other advantage I see to using a 21/0/40 build is the damage you gain in movement heavy fights from using corruption and sl.

All that said I'll probably use the old standby if I ever make the permanent switch from demonology.

I was refering to 30/21/10. Due to the reasons I mentioned I won't trust any calculations that make it appear competitive.

21/0/40 is definitely a viable alternative. You take a hit in personal damage, and in hit points, but you're more mana/health efficient and provide blood pact.

21/0/40 is certainly a decent build if you have to have an imp out and still get a good use out of Crit gear.

Assuming you didn't have an UA lock (why else would you need an imp out), you lose is malediction and 1-5% less physical damage, which does make a big difference, likely moreso than the extra damage, if any, from 21/0/40.

This is exactly why I don't understand why there's any discussion of actually raiding with 21/0/40: prima facie, it just doesn't min/max at all. Because the spec has none of the affliction utility (Malediction or Shadow Embrace), it is a personal DPS spec. But, it is less personal DPS, requires more debuff slots, and does not increase ISB uptime when compared to 0/21/40, 1/41/19, or 0/40/21. The only time the DPS from 21/0/40 would be comparable to the other three personal DPS specs is on encounters where the other specs are forced to use an Imp. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only encounter where Demon/Destro warlocks are generally "forced" to use an Imp is Najentus. Granted, the argument that in movement based fights you'll gain DPS from Instant Corruption, Imp LT, and Siphon Life bears some consideration. But, in practice, what movement based fights actually allow Instant Corruption, Imp LT, and Siphon Life to overcome the 15% damage bonus to shadow bolt from 0/21/40 or the pet DPS, 2% more crit, and higher spell damage from a Demonology DPS spec? Keep in mind that it's been consistently demonstrated on these forums through both parses and theory that destro/demon DPS specs can obviate the mobility advantage of instant DOTs by saving Life Taps for times of movement. Still, if anyone has parses that demonstrate well played (meaning high cast-time used and high DOT uptime) 21/0/40 versus a similarly well played "conventional" warlock DPS spec, I'd be more than happy to re-evaluate the actual value of "increased mobility."

Unless you're regularly using an Imp for the MT because you're the only warlock in the raid, it just doesn't make sense for a warlock DPS spec to use an Imp. And, if that is the case, then you'd be far more useful to your raid respeccing to an affliction utility build (something similar to this). Granted, it's conceivable that Malediction is wasted on CoR in a particularly melee heavy raid. In that instance, however, 21/0/40 is still only comparable to the other DPS specs if you're routinely using an Imp for the MT; but, if so, you're still better off with a UA spec because Shadow Embrace further enhances the MT's survival.

The conclusion? With the exception of performing a purely DPS role on the Najentus encounter, 21/0/40 is suboptimal when compared to other warlock DPS specs. Thus, like 30/21/10, it's a spec that demonstrates a warlocks lack of deeper understanding of how the class talents and game scaling work.

Edit: A typo was missed during the initial proof-reading, sorry.

The ISB uptime difference between 21/0/40 and 0/21/40 isn't that large assuming you're not the only warlock in the raid creating uptime. If you are the gap is pretty huge but that's generally not the case. Remember uptime isn't just the number of shadow bolts cast but also the crit rating in relation to the number of shadow bolts cast. 21/0/40 will cast fewer bolts but the crit rating should be very similar to 0/21/40.

The real benefit I see of 21/0/40 over 0/21/40 is less reliance on hots to sustain dps. If you're raid set up is such that you regularly get topped off or dropped a hot after tapping then 0/21/40 is the superior spec in 90% of fights. 0/21/40 gains more benefit from moonkin and elemental shaman buffs though then 21/0/40 for obvious reasons.

I wouldn't say someone speccing 21/0/40 lacks a deeper understanding of the class or game scaling. The spec does have it's place and it's uses depending on raid make up much like 30/21/10 being a decent spec for a four 'lock raid that only uses one shadow priest. I think 21/0/40 is much less of a niche build then 30/21/10 though.

Personally I plan to stick with demo for a good long time. Just playing devil's advocate here.

I think your arguments for 21/0/40 are pretty valid. There are a number of worthwhile builds with x/x/40. None of them is likely to outdps 0/21/40, but it'll be close enough for gear/skill/latency to be the more significant factor, and there's some nice utility involved.

But 30/21/10 is just horrible, especially with multiple locks in the raid. The spec relies on throwing Shadow Bolts in between Corruption/Siphon, about as much as the destruction warlock.

Except those bolts do less damage, and are at 8% less crit. Occasionally Nightfall procs, making you eat even more charges. The affliction warlock /spriests will not be too happy about the debuffs you're slapping on there, and the destro warlock won't be too happy to see his ISBs being eaten by weak Shadow Bolts. And all this so you have to be healed less than the destro warlock.

It'll do damage. No one is saying it won't. But its total lack of synergy with other shadow people, and undeniably lower individual dps, in addition to the mediocre utility gained from Siphon Life, make it a clearly inferior choice over any of the other available builds listed in the Compendium.

The only way I see 30/21/10 being viable is if you have three other 'locks to run CoR, CoS, and CoE for you as well as keep ISB up. On top of that you'd need a raid that was somehow light on debuff space. So if two of those other three 'locks where affliction and you had one shadow priest it wouldn't work. The reason for this is the only way a 30/21/10 warlock can pull a substantial lead over other specs is through amplified dooms. The spec does it better then any other spec. I don't think this alone would be enough to give the spec a dps lead over a 0/21/40 spec assuming both 'locks where dropping doom rather then a utility curse.

Really though I agree with whoever said you may as well just find another shadow priest instead. For the debuff space used a second shadow priest would return way more utility then a fourth warlock, especially if that fourth warlock is running this spec.

Unfortunately, amp curse only affects the base damage, so adds 2100 damage over the unamped version. Also, COD is not affected by Shadow Mastery.

You're looking at 2100 damage per 3 minutes over the destro version, or 12dps. In return, the spell you spam continuously does less damage.

Just let it rest. It's never ever going to outdps an equally competent equally geared destro warlock. Except if you bring no healers.

This is a wonderful resource and the great debate means it's still being expanded and refined. I specced my Warlock as deep Affliction (44/0/17) originally as back then I don't think it was obvious that Destruction would overtake it so soon for pure Raid DPS.

But I'm still chuckling at Arelenda's downranked Immolate as it lays to rest a wee debate we had on our guild forum long before he started this thread

Sorry I've nothing constructive to add other than as a Warlock Alt Player I say "Keep up the great work".

The point of ISB is not to increase that one single 0/21/40 Warlocks DPS, it helps the overall raid DPS. There is no guarantee that the 30/21/10 warlock will "eat" it. Also I think you underestimate the the bolts this build puts out, albiet not as high crits they are much better than an Affliction lock. Remember 30% of your DPS for non bolt spammer builds still comes from Bolts.

I think the point some of you are still missing is that with this spec you trade raid utility for versatility. This can certainly be a bad thing if every lock specced this way just like it would be a bad thing if every lock was FG Raid spec. However if you have other locks filling the utility role then having one of these locks or an FG raid spec lock doesnt hurt and they have potential to put out numbers.


EDIT::

This was from our Hydross kill the other night. Not my best night as I had UI and Lag issues. Also no Doom was used and I think I was on CoR duty on this one (cant remember, sleeped since then)

Wow Web Stats

As to the 30/21/10 issue:

I tried it early on (learning VR and Lurker) and while it was competitive in the DPS aspect, the lack of threat reduction is what made me respec. I was doing above average DPS for the raid, but I was gaining threat to a degree where I couldn't continue DPS until my shatter cooldown finished.

As to CoR:

You are missing a major aspect to CoR. Not only do you have to figure in melee DPS compared to Doom, you also need to add in the DPS increase of all classes due to the higher threat generation of the tank. If I recall correctly, Pre-BC CoR increased raid DPS by 3%.

The original post in this thread provides guidance for gear choice for each of the builds it reviews. For both demonolgy and destruction specs it recommends spell haste as being more valuable than either spell crit, or spell damage. This runs contrary to most of the advice and simulation/theorycrating I have read such as:

Warlock scaling simulation

I've also spent some time playing around with the warlock dps spreadsheets and have not seen spell haste as being more valuable in terms of dps than simply adding more +damage.

Is there a factor that I am missing that makes spell haste more valuable to these builds than is immediately obvious?

You are deluding yourself if you think a 30/21/10 build is an optimal raiding build. And to top it off, you link an AoE fight?

Although I have to admit, 30/21/10 probably puts out the strongest Seed of Corruption

At most reasonable gear levels, haste is approximately as good as spell damage as 0/21/40 (for me, .99 haste is 1 damage). It's really personal preference.

Well, I'm basing that on ShadowSeer data. It measures total time spent casting, calculates hypothetical time gained with a bonus x to haste rating, and turns it into hypothetical shadow bolt spam (including ISB estimate and with lifetap/dark pact to compensate for the mana cost). The damage output of those extra bolts is considered as the hypothetical gain for x haste rating

It calculates the gains for +damage too, by calculation the % increase your base spells get from a bonus to spellpower. It then applies this to your totals. That's the hypothetical gain from damage.

The numbers for gaining 100 haste are consistently higher for me (0/21/40) than for 100 points in any other rating (or 100 damage).

for reference, I have 1220 spellpower buffed with Fel Armor. Around 150 hit and 290 crit rating. 100 more spelldamage boosts my dps with around 5%. 100 haste usually translates into 7-8%. Crit and Hit vary, since ISB varies a lot between bosses and trash.



Main theory is this: all stats have diminishing returns. At the moment haste gear becomes available, warlocks are already packing 1200+ spellpower. Upping haste gets you a %based increase. You need quite a bit of spellpower to get the same % since you already have tons. The highest increases are for the first points of haste. It probably reaches saturation pretty quickly. I estimate it at 150-250 but that's just an educated guess.


The problem is that this is all theory. The _real_ benefits of haste, especially given the low effective difference in casting time, are plain impossible to measure. There's no way to filter out lag.

That is a good point, though. We overlooked SoC. SoC spam fights might be tipped in favor of 30/21/10.

As for 30/21/10 and ISB... Affliction Warlocks get a nice bonus from ISB to all their dots, without consuming charges. Hence the high synergy between destro/affliction.

I'll post some TK stuff from this week, maybe Al'ar or something else in there non AOE.

Again I am not saying this is the build that saves WOW, just saying its not crap and if other locks fill the other roles then this is viable as is the FG raid spec even at the higher gear levels.


Vlar,

You are correct the Aggro is an issue on the destruction side for this build however not so for the Affliction side, atleast not anymore so than a UA lock.

The 30/21/10 lock will be doing about ~60% of his casting time on SBs with a significantly lower crit rate than 21/40. There is no guarantee he won't crit, but on the average he will be lowering the ISB uptime for the raid (even more than an affliction lock -- who at least provides malediction/SE to the raid).

The "it does ok" argument just doesn't stick for me. I could find some random talent build that "does ok" but I don't see the point in the context of raiding. I'm constantly trying to find ways to eek out another dps of my toon, so losing some firepower (let alone comparatively nerfing shadow raid damage and eating 2-3 more debuff slots) in exchange for 2 instant dots and some healing just doesn't cut the mustard.

In conclusion, the argument is going like this:
pro-30/21/10: "It's not the best, but that's ok"
anti-30/21/10: "It's not the best, and that's not ok"

So I'm signing out on this one ... :P

Actually, the greater blessings received by warlock pets depends upon the pet. The felguard receives warrior blessings, while all of the other pets receive warlock blessings. The only one I'm unsure about is the voidwalker, but this pet is pretty much useless in a raid setting.

It is also worth noting that phase shifted imps do not receive any group buffs. If a demonology warlock is using an imp, remember to remove phase shift before the group starts buffing. Also remember to reactivate phase shift before entering combat, or AoE abilities will insta-gib your imp. If you do forget to activate phase shift, you can always turn on autocast, dismiss the imp, and resummon it to keep its buffs and have it phase shift.

Thanks! Added.

Thanks for so succinctly summarizing the argument.

But an Affliction 'lock has higher crit, should increase ISB uptime, and eats less ISB charges when compared to 30/21/10.

What versatility? 30/21/10 has no utility and suffers more from using an Imp than any other spec discussed in this thread. Perhaps myself and the other "anti-30/21/10" advocates are missing something crucial, but all I (we) can see is a trade of all utility, all +crit talents, Ruin, and Shadow and Flame/Demon defensive and offensive talents/UA for Imp LT, Instant Corruption, Siphon Life and Shadow Mastery. In short, 30/21/0 ignores the defining talents in every tree to gain what appears to be little.


I'm not sure what this parse is supposed to show. You out-DPSed the other two warlocks present. 'Grats? I hope you realize you can't conclude your spec is superior just because you out-DPS the other warlocks in your raids. After all, a cursory glance through the parse demonstrates the other two warlocks are affliction (ill-suited for that particular encounter) and had significantly lower DOT uptime than you (indicating worse play). Not to mention this is an AOE fight and the single advantage your spec has over others is higher SoC damage. By the way, to give you some perspective, you should search WWS for other Hydross parses. You'll find that well played Felguard 'locks, even at your gear level, output 1400-1500+ DPS (as compared to your 1050 DPS).



I have to take offense with the notion that a player should spec (or gear) sub-optimally to cover for weaknesses in other parts of the raid - specifically healing. Maximizing your individual ability to contribute is just as much about helping and teaching your raid-mates as it is about perfecting your own play. If you have to count on Siphon Life to fuel your Life Taps, then something is very wrong. Your time would be best spent trying to understand and fix the problems preventing healers from tossing you a HOT or a direct heal occasionally. I realize some raids are healing strapped, but I can't imagine a successful raid that is so healing strapped it can't spare a few GCDs and several hundred mana to fuel a warlock.


My theme appears to be my lack of imagination for situations when 30/21/10, 21/0/40, and other such "non-maximized" specs actually shine. While supporters of such specs may be quick to point out examples, I challenge those supporters to justify why it's "ok" to be sub-optimal most of the time just to be able to occasionally, but rarely, thriving. From my calculus, the expected value of such specs is significantly lower than that of the "conventional" specs.

I'd rather you not lump them all together. Any build with 40 points in destruction can be completed with 21 points spread according to taste, and will not be outdamaged by more than 15% by 0/21/40. And it'll have an imp out. Given the relatively low impact of maximum 15% of personal dps vs some utility, I think other factors (personal skill, latency, deaths) will be much more important in determining outcome of a fight (or final dps, if that's what you care about).

No sane person is saying it consistently outdamages 0/21/40. It's easily proven not to be so.

But one could make a case for it to be close enough dpswise, and at that point we're arguing about tastes, really. Benefits of Blood Pact/Imp LT/Shadowfury or whatever else you can fit in 0/0/40 vs max15% dps are not measurable and highly subjective. I personally prefer 0/21/40, but I wouldn't call anyone speccing differently wrong by default.

I'm pretty convinced that for almost any raid community, raid dps/efficiency could be boosted more by focusing on other matters, instead of fussing over those 21 demonology points.

This is my last say on the matter, as I don't see any point in discussing 30/21/10 or different warlock tastes. The Compendium lists the default specs, with some alternatives that are popular, detailing tradeoffs made. That's all it needs to, so my work is done on that part.

Ah but the thing is, if 21/0/40 is so great because you get an imp but do less damage than 0/21/40, why not go 41/0/20 or a variant to get more damage as well as more utility?

It's simply a mediocre spec - it will do ok, but there are better specs out there.

Heh, I thanks for making my point. First you say 30/21/10 has the advantage because its an AOE fight. Then you say you lack imagination for situations when 30/21/10, actually shine... Which is it?

Any who, forget I mention it, this is just like the old Affliction vs Destro build where most folks just pick one side and fail to consider the other.

So it was said its crap for DPS, then IDK posts numbers showing not so. Then I post logs which again show its not crap for DPS. I knew by posting the logs somone would use the arguement well the other locks "suck" arguement or its a movement fight so 0/21/40 doesnt get to bolt spam, or its not dot friendly or pick any excuse. I'm sure I made mistakes too if you look closely where I could improve.

Its said the build lacks versatility and there aren't any fights where it will shine, yet by your own admission you say it shines in AOE fights.

Either way, I'm done with this.

One thing worth adding to the Compendium is that Rank 3 Curse of the Elements should be used over Rank 4, and Rank 2 Curse of Shadow over Rank 3. The new, post-60 ranks of those Curses aren't prioritized in the debuff system, while their lower level counterparts are.

Both offer the increased 10% damage to their respective schools and cost less mana as an added benefit. The spell penetration they offer doesn't affect PvE targets.



EDIT: Oops, I just noticed it was mentioned to a certain extent in the first post.

You're correct if the raid is threat capped. If so, CoR increases the tank's threat gen in 2 ways. It ups his damage done by reduced armor, but also gives him more rage since he's taking more damage. However if the fight isn't threat-capped, that DPS increase shouldn't be counted.

I think you're missing the point. While I agree 30/21/10 has the highest damage SoC of any spec, that does not mean it "shines" in AOE fights. You'll note that from your own linked parse SoC accounts for just 43% of your DPS. Even in Morogrim, perhaps the fight most friendly to SoC spam, SoC generally does not account for more than 55% of top warlock's DPS (as evidenced by these parses). While not casting SoC, the rest of your damage is diminished relative to other specs. Is the slight AOE advantage on a few specific encounters worth the diminished DPS/Utility in every non-AOE aspect of raid encounters? Given that no one spec is strictly better than the others, would you rather be better than the rest at a small fraction of raiding or a large fraction?



To Arelenda: Thanks for the time and effort compiling this thread. I realize part of the spec debates come to down to "personal taste" in so far as willingness to min/max for a specific role. Further commentary on the topic is likely fruitless. Perhaps, though, it would be useful to more clearly denote the raid relevant differences between the default specs and the listed alternatives. For example:
"The Siphon Life spec drops Demonic Sacrifice for Improved Life Tap and Siphon Life, making you more self reliant. Key talents are the standard destro ones (SnF, Ruin, +8% crit) and Siphon Life. Not as high dps output as the default build, but does require less heals and Life Taps and provides Blood Pact."
...becomes:
"The Siphon Life spec drops Demonic Sacrifice for Improved Life Tap and Siphon Life, making you more self reliant. Key talents are the standard destro ones (SnF, Ruin, +8% crit) and Siphon Life. As much as 15% less DPS than default build. Loses 15% shadow damage, 30 spell damage, 6% healing received, 18% Stamina, 3% Intellect, and Demonic Sacrifice. Gains unimproved Blood Pact (minimizes net stamina change), Improved Life Tap, Instant Corruption, Siphon Life, and -10% Affliction Threat."

"Versatility" doesn't mean much in the context of a pure dps class. From a raid perspective, damage by DOTs or damage by nukes is just damage. Yes, 30/21/10 has greater "versatility," but I don't see what good that is. Just like the threat value of CoR doesn't matter if your tank's threat is already top-notch, the self-reliance of 30/21/10 doesn't matter if your healers have mana to spare. And the odd thing is, either you or they will have more mana to spare with 21/40 or 40/21, depending on who has the happy shadow priest, so it can easily end up being a wash anyways.
Perhaps we can name 30/21/10 "Seed Spec"? =P

As far as 21/0/40... yeees, the difference is capped at 15%... 15% is fucking huge. If one of my dpsers was underperforming by 15% they'd get a swift kick in the ass and told to stop falling asleep or let their younger brother play their account. While the real difference is going to be smaller, it's not going to be by much. Siphon Life is a piddling little spell for damage and the talents between 7 and 21 affliction don't really do much but set up talents further down the tree. My suggestion would be to stop at 7 in affliction flesh out a few talents in destro, and get some toys in demo instead. Something like this. Just as 'viable' for raiding but more fun and flexible outside.

Some of the Hyjal trash (the felhunters) and a +all resistance aura, Supremus has very high fire resist, and Illidari council can cast a 250 to all resist buff.


Certainly those are limited, but worth noting.


If you don't have debuff slot issues, you should pay the extra 100 mana just in case.

I poked around that WWS for a bit, and found that, given ruin and 8% more crit, the damage was about equal for both specs. But that's not why I'm posting.

I noticed a major difference in debuffs in both raids.

Here's the details on Hydross from Cronjob's WWS on Fate's Hand Hydross Kill:
Hydross the Unstable - WWS -- recorded by a Hunter


And here's details on Hydross from a Hydross kill from my own raiding guild, TFR:
Hydross the Unstable - WWS -- recorded by an enhancement Shaman

Note the huge difference in debuffs. One Thunder Clap. One CoR (which lasts 2 minutes). ONE application of Shadow Vulnerability.

Can anyone with more experience than me with WWS explain the existence of this discrepance? At first I figured it was because debuffs were being reapplied before they ran out (and therefore not shown in the combat log), but Hydross seems to get debuffed by Mind Flay 11 times, despite a Shadow Priest in FH doing 100% of his damage on Hydross, almost half of it through Mind Flay.

The only plausible explanation I can come up with, is that the FH log is recorded by a Hunter, and the TFR one by a melee person. Apparently range has a huge impact on debuff logging by WWS. Can anyone confirm this?

If the debuffer casts the debuff before the last one runs out or if the debuff is shared among players, like Mind Flay, it is possible to have just one debuff in WWS the whole right (since other priests are casting Mind Flay at different times, effectively rolling the debuff).

In addition, sometimes WWS does not pickup debuffs for some reason.

haha.. I like this. If I'm ever feeling rich I may roll into AV after 2.3 with this spec and drop nothing but seeds.

Back on topic, discovered something pretty important concerning ISB uptime today. The debuff is counted when the spell leaves your hands. So if three warlocks have bolts in the air on a mob with one charge left all three will receive the benefits of the debuff even if none of those shadow bolts crit. Granted the way I tested it was on Dr. Boom by putting ISB up and then starting my cast with three seconds left on the debuff. So while it's possible that the debuff works differently when it's the charges that make it fall off rather then it expiring I find it more likely that the code uses one standard. Curses work the same way, if you cast shadow bolt and then drop curse of shadows before your shadow bolt lands you will not receive the added damage from the curse and the opposite is true if you have curse of shadows up, cast a shadow bolt, and then drop a curse of weakness to overwrite your curse of shadows, the shadow bolt will receive the benefit of the first curse.

So any build with a 36 yard range on shadow bolts will affectively get more use out of ISB then any build that does not because of the longer in flight time of their shadow bolts.

I noticed this behaviour when coding ShadowSeer. The debuff application usually lags 0.5-0.7seconds behind the crit too. There's all kinds of weirdness in ISB debuff, which is why I don't really trust any theorethical model for it.

This is exactly correct. If you see more than one Misery, CoR, COS, etc, it means that the debuff fell off and was reapplied.

I also suspect that happens with Nightfall procs, though it's harder to test. If both crit the damage they do is about the same, meaning the debuff from the first crit shadowbolt isn't instantly applied on the mob.

It's the same case with frost nova on a target then icelance at the same time even if one breaks the frost nova they both get the 50% more crit because their damage and crit chance is decided when they leave your hands not when they hit the target. This is probably done for computational reasons.

This is my speculation about how the servers handle spells and is in no way fact.
It is easier if the server knows a 3k shadowbolt is traveling towards the target with 35% crit rate all it has to do is workout whether it hits/crits/resists on the target(that the fate of the spell is not determined when you cast it can be clearly seen by rogues vanishing deathcoils and the like). The alternative of calculating damage when the target is hit would require the server to lookup the casters spell damage and buffs which could lead to a delay in the damage actually being done. Previously dots had their damage calculated moment to moment from the caster so you could put dots up pop a damage trinket and the dots would start hitting harder along with your sexy shadowbolts. Now the base damage is calculated from your +dmg at casting and each tick checks for debuffs on the mob. Coa used to be even weirder because it would be cast from the warlock, so if the warlock died or went out of range then coa would stop doing damage.

Edit: I tried hitting icon after I had completed a shadowbolt but before it reached the mob and it didn't seem like the shadowbolt got the damage bonus.

While on the subject of specs, I thought I would throw in the following hypothetical situation to see if any mathematically inclined members of the community would be interested in simulating it:

What if a 0/21/40 Destruction nuke build Warlock had both [Ashtongue Talisman of Shadows] and the 4-piece Tier 5 bonus [Hood of the Corruptor]. Would the Warlock notice a DPS boost by speccing 1/21/39 (A point out of SnF, and into Imp. Corruption) and incorporating Corruption into their 'rotation'?

To summarize:

for nukes: (Shadow Bolt, Soul Fire, etc)

Spellpower is "locked in" at START of the cast.
Multipliers are "locked in" at the COMPLETION of cast.
If it's a projectile, it'll start traveling at that point.


for dots and channeled spells: (Drain Life, Corruption, UA, etc)

Spellpower is "locked" in at START of cast.
Multiplier is recalculated at every tic.

I'm assuming crit bonuses (frost mages vs frozen targets) are also "locked in" at completion of cast, but am unable to test this.

(this information is WRONG, see below)

I'll assume no internal cooldown.

Assuming you get your corruption to tic every 3s, it'll proc every 15s on average. That means it's up 1/3 of the time, roughly, so gives you 220/3=76 spellpower on average. That's about equal to the [Icon of the Silver Crescent], which has 43+155/6=70spellpower on average. So it's not a great upgrade.



Math for 1/21/39 vs 0/21/40:

Assuming 1300 spell power, 25% crit chance

You're losing 4% of your spellpower on each bolt, which is 2,67% less damage per bolt. (1300*1,06+575 vs 1300*1,02+575 or 1950 vs 1900)

You'll be casting roughly one corruption per 6 shadow bolts. Corruption is 2334 damage (900+1300*0,94 plus 10% set bonus)

The original rotation would get 6.6 shadow bolts off. In theory a bit more damage, but there are a few factors: lower range on corruption, no threat reduction, two additional debuff slots (assuming the T6 set bonus leaves a debuff), and no ISB. I'd say debatable.

I imagined it would be a close call, yeah. I think I'll give it a shot and compare WWS's once I obtain the exalted BT trinket, while I do not anticipate earthshattering DPS gains, I am still curious about how it would pan out.

After all the discussion I've read about how armor does not have diminishing returns in terms of the character's lifespan (though the % reduction does), I'm curious as to how CoR doesn't work in the opposite way (i.e.- each point of armor reduction has an equal effect to shortening the mob's lifespan, though, as has been calculated, the %reduction in armor is reduced with diminishing returns)?

Thanks

Something to note is the four piece tier five bonus is calculated before spell damage. On average it produced a gain of about six damage per tic per shadow bolt applied. Assuming a fully debuffed mob you may push that number as high as 9 or 10 or roughly a 3 dps gain on the last five tics of corruption. Granted it does keep stacking but still the numbers are less then impressive.

Assuming a non-optimal casting rotation of one shadow bolt applied every three seconds (due to lag, movement, or whatever... but mostly just because I don't feel up to breaking down anything more complicated at the moment) here's some numbers.

second tic +10 damage
third tic +20 damage
fourth tic +30 damage
fifth tic +40 damage
sixth tic +50 damage

150 extra damage over eighteen seconds or about eight more dps then without the set bonus. Even if we double that number to 16 to account for DS and ISB (and to give the option some leniency in it's favor) it doesn't make up for the 20 dps loss the 0/21/40 warlock has in Arlenda's example from moving that point out of S & F. Keep in mind too that Arlenda's numbers are calculated assuming no other debuffs on the mob, 1300 spell power 0/21/40 warlocks see closer to 3k point shadow bolts on average in a raid environment.

Unless your dps would go up by moving one point into corruption to begin with (which is very possible for 0/21/40 'locks with lower crit ratings) I wouldn't spec just for the tier five bonus.

The set bonus does not add a debuff but rather amps up the damage of your corruption (when you attempt to reapply a corruption before your amped one falls off you'll get a message much like with amplified curse of agony, 'a more powerful spell is already active'.)

Unless the buff stacks, the uptime is slightly lower than this due to 20% of the buffs removing 2 seconds of the previous buff.

Seconds of buff time per tick of corruption = (0.2*0.8*5+0.2*0.2*3)

So uptime = (0.2*0.8*5+0.2*0.2*3)/3 = 30.67%

This brings average spellpower to 67.47 which drops it lower than the Icon for single targets.

As pointed out in other threads, the benefit goes up if you're corrupting multiple targets.

That may be true, but not including mention of the increased threat production will be a limiting factor if a warlock is trying to inform the raid leader that CoR is beneficial. Since this is supposed to be informative to raiding warlocks, I do not see why all such information would not be included.

I never said it shouldn't be included, I think it should as it's definitely another component of CoR usage. I was just noting the exceptions to considering it a flat "raid dps" increase.

Included now.

You misspelled Sacrifice.


To the 1/21/39 people that are using 4 Tier 5 and Ashtongue trinket, it is better dps on paper, but then you have more aggro, less range, and are more affected by spell pushback on Corruption, plus you will use more mana (370 mana in 2 seconds vs 399 mana in 2.5 seconds or 185 mana per second vs 159.6 mana per second), and imp SB will up less.

Not worth it unless you really want to use the Ashtongue trinket.

In the stat section, I would include intellect as it converts directly to critical strike chance. I think a lot of locks are so stat-averse we forget that. With kings (and gnome racial) this can add a decent amount of weight to some items.

This doesn't seem right. Every indication I have seen is that the damage a nuke does is determined once the spell leaves your hands. Otherwise, it would be optimal to cast your biggest, baddest nuke when your Icon of the Silver Crescent is about to run out. The same thing applies to DoTs: the base damage from spellpower is only applied at the end of cast.

A good way to demonstrate this for nukes is to go to Dr. Boom and dump Searing Pain on him using the Icon of the Silver Crescent. How many spells benefit from the increased damage after the buff fades? It will almost always be zero (lag being a factor here). If spellpower locked in at the start of cast, then you would almost always get one cast benefiting from Spell Power after the buff fades (you start casting Searing Pain. Spell Power fades from you. Your Searing Pain hits Dr. Boom for xxx damage).

The only thing locked in at start of cast is spell haste modifiers... that's why putting a Curse of Tongues on someone midcast has no effect on when that spell finishes.

I'll double check when servers are up, but I doubt I'd be wrong about this.

UPDATE: Turns out I was, in fact, wrong. Thanks for correcting me.


Testing proves:

for nukes: (Shadow Bolt, Soul Fire, etc)
Spellpower AND Multiplier are measured at the COMPLETION of cast.
If it's a projectile, it'll start traveling at that point.

for dots (Corruption, UA, etc)
Spellpower "locked in" at completion of cast.
Multiplier reevaluated per tic

for channeled spells: (Drain Life, Hellfire)
Spellpower is "locked" at START of cast.
Multiplier is recalculated at every tic.

I'm assuming crit bonuses (frost mages vs frozen targets) are also "locked in" at completion of cast, but am unable to test this.

I'll need to update ShadowSeer.

ShadowSeer updated to reflect this. It won't affect data much, though.

I was wondering if a felguard raiding warlock could post not only which fights work well with the spec (as it's been done before), but also some info/guideline of which boss abilities a felguard could be targeted with, and which ones wont target it.

For example, will mark of kaz'rogal affect the felguard? I've never raided with * 41 * but it seems to me that it might be quite hard to optimize it.

Basing this on hunter pets, i reckon that they can't be targeted with Azgalor doom, Teron doom, Mother fatal attraction etc, so are we looking at a "specific target" immunity for the felguard, opposed to getting all kinds of aoe effects (like mark of kaz'rogal)?

I've been raiding with a FG for the last week and I'm very happy with it. So far out of everything in BT/Hyjal the only fights I've trouble trying to keep him alive on are Kaz'rogal, Archimonde, and Council. Initially I was specced 6/44/11, but last night I specced 1/44/15 (still deciding where I want to put my last point) and liked it a bit more (moreso for personal reason like my computer's performance and things seem to go a bit smoother spellcasting wise with the non instant corruption, vs casting an instant one and getting *that spell isn't ready yet* when trying to cast my next spell).

For Kaz'rogal my pet seemed to be affected with the mark like other mana users, but mana feed negated that easily enough. Same for RoS, he goes oom as well, but either he was avoiding the damage from the 2nd Essence, or was completely unaffected by it. For the 3rd Essence he was taking some damage from the aura, but he resisted quited a bit since I think raid buffed and with Void Star Talisman he was at 200ish resists, and stayed alive for the fights duration.
For Archimonde the FG can will still be hit by any aoe and can be cursed as well. On Teron he can not be doomed, and still takes damage from random aoe.
Mother, he can't not be fatally attracted.

But so far, any fight that is basically melee friendly the FG is amazing. Aside from the bosses that I listed he was very easy to keep alive and I didn't have to worry about him much, but on the others I was better off using an imp or saccing something as I would have to resummon the pet several times and it wasn't worth it to have him out. Hope that helps some.

I admit that im quite bad at understanding other people's roles in raid environment, so this might be inaccurate.

Judging by your post and my experience as affliction lock only i'd reckon that:

- Najentus: can't be used. Apparently the damage is so much that even 2p t5 can't make it.

- Supremus: as i said i fail at understanding it here, might be good

- Akama: surely amazing

- Teron: surely amazing

- Bloodboil: i reckon hearing something about fel acid that melee needed to pay attention to, but all in all i reckon it works well here too (i suppose that it cant be the target of fel rage yeah?)

- Ros: can it be fixated? phase 2 might work well but i might need a fel puppy. p3 should be good.

- Mother: should be quite good here, unless the shadow rez gear nerfs it to ridiculous. Might despawn if you get ported and need to run too far from it?

- Illidari: what is the problem here that jaeydn reported i'm not so sure

- Illidan: p1 should be good (can't get parasytes right?). p2 is definitely harder to manage. p3 is as p1 but the flames, which i reckon it won't be able to get. p4 shows my lack of knowledge in this, having used just an imp in the past year. is the felguard threat separate or added to the warlock? actually he can't melee him, but i'd like to know how pet threat works anyway

- Winterchill: i guess that it works alright here

- Anatheron: same as before

- Kaz'rogal: not so sure, i guess that with void star talisman etc he will resist quite some marks, but with 1 point in feed im not so sure it's easy to not let it go oom without extra lifetaps (lowering ur dps)

- Azgalor: supposedly quite good in here too. Extra avoidance against rain of fire is nice.

- Archimonde: how does air burst work with it? Can it be directly targeted by it? Will it go in the air if someone in range is air bursted? If so, when it will die from the landing no soul charge will be placed on archimonde right? What about the aoe fear+doomfires? Avoidance works giving it a chance to resist the fear or not (i guess not)?

Thanks for the answers, might be good for a lock approaching the demo way.

Najentus, surprisingly I didn't have any trouble keeping the pet up. Usually he would catch a chain heal right after Tidal Shield, or avoid the burst completely.

On Council, I dps on Gathios the Shatterer, and while the pet would sometimes eat a consecrate tick, the combination that plus either blizzard or flamestrike hitting me or the pet would prove to be too much damage and he would die. I mentioned before that my computer is kind of bad so I deal with bad FPS and an internet connection that freezes up every few moments so my reaction time is sometimes too slow to move the pet out of harm. So you might have better luck on that boss than I did, also what you do in the fight might be different.

Mother, I did get ported but both times it wasn't really far so I didn't have an incident of the pet despawning, nor when I got tossed in the air. *I was extremely surprised at my performance on this fight, since normally me and the other affliction lock in the raid place low on top 10/11 for damage. The added resists from the pet allowed me to use a regular dps piece instead of SR, and I resisted a ton of damage overall. Particularly the mana drains, and ended up placing #1.

Supremus, I didn't get to see the FG in action long enough since I died early, but it does well enough just have to manuver it around fires.

Archimonde, he can't be air bursted that I saw, but the fires chewed him up really fast, same with Azgalor. I'd try to move him as soon as I saw the Rain of Fire over the melee but I could barely pull him back to me in time.

Illidan, phase one with him is still basically tank and spank and I don't really have to worry too much about him. Phase two, I keep him next to me unless I see a good opening for him to dps an elemental. Phase three I move him in and out to to dps the boss when he is no danger of being in a fire (I didn't risk sending him in at all on the warlock tank part).

Some of the fights that I wasn't able to successfully keep my pet alive I'll try again next week without using soul link. That would have probably helped a lot since I would tend to take damage after my pet had and vice versa. Then I can weigh wether or not it's worth it keep the non soul linked FG out, or just sac a succy/fg or keep out an imp (dps wise).

I'm still pretty new to this myself, as you said, I've been raiding with either a passive pet or a sacced one for the better part of 2 years. One 2.3 goes live some aspects of raiding demo will be even easier with pets automatically moving to get behind a boss, it was really nice when I had him on PTR when we did ZA.

The 2.3 change surely makes it even better yeah. I guess i'll try it a bit on the ptr too, my main fear is that micromanaging it well < the dps loss.

Overall unless it's one of the pet unfriendly fights you rarely have to worry at the FG. Turn on auto cleave and let him run wild. 2pc T5 takes care of him nicely(which I hope they add something like that set bonus to the demo tree) cause I really don't like being chained to those items to retain a spec, but as I am really liking the build I guess I have no choice. =)

For Naj, the pet does have a 50% to not get hit. If you don't want to roll the dice, you have a few options. You can run without Soul Link or you can do a pet dismiss when the shield is up and then start recasting the FG (so he keeps his buffs) so he comes back with full health. My guild wants me to have the imp out, so I never got to try either option.

For Archimonde, I think it would be best to sac a Succy or run with phased imp (not sure if you would soul link the imp), doomfires are killer. In addition, if your pet is hitting Arch and you get Air bursted, you need to do a /petfollow so he doesn't despawn.


For General Demo pet info, make sure he gets buffed especially the imp (just unphase him and then rephase, it helps that the imp gets the buffs you get).

What's everyone's thoughts on ForteWarlock? I like it a lot better for DoT timers than DoTimer(Use of /stopcasting macros don't mess up the bars). The other features are quite helpful imo, though I only use the Shard tracker, SS tracker and summoning assistant. I also like the macro for using Ritual of Souls, it will say which healthstone your summoning(2080,2200 etc..). Adds a lot of functionality to Warlocks without jamming your macro page full of things. All of my guilds warlocks now use this mod.

One of the major functions is that regardless of who applies Imp SB to the target, you get the DoT timer with the charges remaining.

If a lot of other people agree maybe it should be added to the addon's section.

I agree about ForteWarlock, the summoning assistant alone is worth the download. I haven't had any experience with the timers though, at present im still using DoTimer to handle that. Though I may have another look at that since you've found it as useful, especially the ISB debuff tracking.

If you happen to have very high stamina, you can leave your Felguard sitting in the back and it will be ok. It needs to have a bit over 9k HP and 3/3 Demonic Resilience to be safe though.

Just pull the Felguard out when he switches to the walking around phase and it will be fine. The blue trails of fire don't do anything to the Felguard. It's immune to them.

My Felguard has never gotten Fel Rage. I'm pretty sure it cannot target pets. You need to be careful that the Felguard is always behind the boss because of the wide arc of Bloodboil's abilities.

Pets cannot be fixated by Essence of Suffering. It can get Soul Drain, but we clump together near the boss and use Mass Dispel to get rid of the debuff on anyone it hits. For Essence of Desire, usually an Affliction Warlock uses a Felhunter, and back when we would get to 0 mana for a bit before it died, I would Fel Domination a Felhunter before I went OOM because it would still have a normal mana bar to continue dispelling Rune Shield.

Not an issue if you have a Void Star Talisman. Its SR will cap, and the Felguard's DPS doesn't suffer too much since so much of its DPS comes from buffs compared to gear.

You have to deal with the possibilities of Flamestrike, Blizzard, and Consecrate. The aoes are rather strong, and it's difficult to path the pet in such a way that it's not going to run through one of those while dodging another. The best thing I've found to do is put the pet on stay in a remote corner to minimize the chance it runs away from a Consecrate into a worse AoE, and just Intercept it back to Gathios once the tank moves him out of the Consecrate.

Pets cannot get parasites. They are not targetted for flames, but can get flames from being too near someone else. In phase 2, it's difficult to allow it to attack, but it does not get hit by the fireballs Illidan throws and I have never seen it targetted for a Barrage. It does get hit by the demon phase fireballs that hit the whole raid though, so you have to be careful it's not taking splash damage. The Felguard's aggro is seperate from yours, which helps to make Demonology one of the lowest threat specs.

Just have to pull it out of Death and Decay quickly.

We position Anatheron facing the casters, so that he never swarms both casters and melee at the same time. I'll position the Felguard back with the melee and it rarely ever takes damage aside from Soul Link.

Felguards never get the mark, so you don't need to worry about this.

I put mine on stay and use it to help out people killing the Doomguards. It will die quickly if it's close to Azgalor.

The pet cannot be targetted for Air Burst. It will take some damage from being close to someone else who is Air Bursted, but it cannot be thrown back. Pets do not give off Soul Charges. Doomfire is not an issue unless the pet gets feared into it because of the distance at which Doomfires spawn. If the pet gets feared, your best bet is just to use DS. The Felguard DS is actually a bit better than Succubus DS for this fight because of the amount of time you'll be able to run around and let the regen tick rather than having to Life Tap.

I found for Najentus that after turning off Soul Link the Felguard stayed up fine.

I concur. I tried out Felguard and liked it, but I really don't like the fact that it's tied to a specific set bonus. If they could find a way to work it into the demo tree somewhere it would definitely make it a much more appealing spec.

Now this is going to sound like a horribly noobish question, but as I have not been a soul link build since like over a year until now, I have no clue how to turn it off lol. I used to be able to click it off myself like any other buff, but now I've been saccing the pet and resummoning it to not have one soul linked.

Unfortunately that is the only way.

As a follow-up to the earlier discussion regarding the 4pc T5 bonus, has Blizzard commented at all whether it's a bug that it only affects base corruption damage right now, and not damage post +spell damage? I recently purchased the T5 helm for the 4pc bonus thinking that it would be a 50-ish DPS upgrade, but now it seems that the gloves off Attumen + Spellstrike Hood/Cowl of the Grand Engineer would be the better choice for a 0/21/40 build.

4 T5 bonus isn't so great, and that is intended.

For destro, the bonus is mostly useless, and about a 20-30 dps increase for Affliction.

Gloves off Attumen are nice, but if you want an upgrade for 0/21/40 look into Doomwalkers gloves. No points spent in stam/int so you might not want to use it in stam fights, but if you're trying to go pure dps they're worth grabbing.

I'm in a similar situation but keeping t4 helm+shoulders because with the set piece it seems at least equal to most gear upgrades I have available, but maybe I'm just lying to myself so I don't have to spend hundreds of gold on primals or ore for the engineering/tailoring helms.

I am leaning towards you lying to yourself. =P

In all seriousness though, I have no idea what your gear is like as I don't have a link to your Armory, but the Spellstrike set have served me well so far. I have the T5 pieces, I just find Spellstrike to be superior (Especially the helm) to T5, especially since I need it to cap hit without resorting to re-geming.

Our of curiosity, how are you getting that estimate for the DPS increase? No matter how I calculate it, it still ends up being around 5 DPS for affliction, before ISB.

The base gain for a corruption tick is 15 (900 base damage, 6 ticks, 10%), and to get the most out of the bonus you assume that all 5 ticks are affected by the buff from shadow bolt.

(1.5*(1+1.1+...+1.1^4))(1.1) = 91.6 damage over 18 seconds, which is roughly 5 DPS.

A 0/21/40 build would gain more due to the succubus sacrifice adding a 1.15 multiplier instead of 1.1 from shadow mastery as well as the fact that a 2 second cast time on corruption allows all 6 ticks to benefit from the set bonus, though of course you could argue that you wouldn't be trying to use the T5 bonus in that situation anyway, since an untalented corruption isn't good in your spell cycle. Yet even for that build, the DPS increase is at best 7 or so.

I just don't see how you could possibly squeeze out anything close to 20 DPS from 4pc T5 using any build.

Add CoS, Misery, Shadow Weaving, ISB. It still sucks, though.

Quick question, does Demonic Sac apply to your base Spell damage or to your Actual damage of the spell.

I.e. You have 1100 shadow damage, multiply that by 15% and thats what sac does.

OR:
Your shadowbolt hits for 3500, Multiply that by 15%.

My reason for this is that Shadow and Flame's tooltip is different then Demonic sac's, and was wondering if it was different.

Shadow and Flame adds 20% more of your +spell to those 2 spells, Demonic Sacrifice takes your outgoing damage and adds a multiplier. (so the latter)

Yes shadow and flame is spcifically a coefficient change, meaning your spells get more out of spell damage. Instead of getting 3/3.5, you get 3/3.5+0.2. Demonic sac and other talents with such a description simply add a % to your final shadowbolt. How it stacks with other things that add +% damage is a different story though (I think it's talents and buffs add up, then the result is multiplied by the sum of debuffs on the target, aka base*(1+talent%+buff%)*(1+debuff%), but I'm very unsure about that).

Overall shadow and flame is like an increase in your spell damage, although in reality it's as effective as having (0.2+3/3.5)/(3/3.5)=1.2333 multiplier to your spell damage or 23.33% more spell damage when it comes to shadowbolt. then that spell damage adds up to the base shadowbolt damage (naked untalented shadowbolt) and then the result gets multiplied by all the multipliers.

How single target spells work:

Total damage = Base Damage + Spellpower * Spell Coefficient


Coefficient is generally casting time / 3.5.

- Coefficient is halved if it has a bonus effect like a life drain (death coil / siphon life / drain soul).
- Snares tend to have 95% of the original coefficient (frost bolt)
- Any spell below 1.5s casting time counts as 1.5. (Shadowburn, Death Coil)
- Dot coefficients are dot length / 15 instead, with damage divided equally per tic. Corruption, CoA and CoD are exceptions (0.94, 1.2 and 2, respectively, with emp corruption adding 0.12 per talent point)
- Cast time reducing talents don't count, it's original casting time. Frostbolt/Fireball are exceptions. But they're standard in 2.3.


Example: Shadow Bolt.

Base damage: 541-603 (according to wowwiki). For some reason my Base Shadow Bolt is listed in wow as 544-607, if anyone can enlighten me why, that'd be appreciated.

Coefficient: 3 / 3.5 (SB cast time is originally 3)

So a bolt would on average hit for: 572 + Spellpower * 0.86

Shadow and Flame adds to the Coefficient, so if you have it it's 572 + Spellpower * (0.86 + 0.2)


Generally, everything that adds to ALL Shadow damage (ISB, CoS, Misery, Shadow Weaving, Demonic Sacrifice) adds to the TOTAL damage, and all modifiers are indepently multiplied.

Example:
Corruption tics for 500.

Add ISB: 500 * 1,2
Add CoS: 500 * 1,2 * 1,1
Add Misery: 500 * 1,2 * 1,1 * 1,05
Add Demonic Sacrifice: 500 * 1,2 * 1,1 * 1,05 * 1,15
Add Shadow Weaving: 500 * 1,2 * 1,1 * 1,05 * 1,15 * 1,1


Notable exceptions to the "boost total damage":
- Amplify curse will only boost base damage
- T5 4p set bonus boost dots weirdly (it modifies the base damage of the dot, and stacks).
- Shadow Mastery doesn't boost CoD.

(updated to correct mistakes)

Warlock Aoe:
Rain of Fire: 8/7 of spellpower to total, divided per tic
Hellfire: 15/7 of spellpower to total, divided per tic
SoC Dot: 3/2 of spellpower (but blows up at fixed amount, which is not affected by power)
SoC Detonation: 1/6 of spellpower

Rain of Fire and Hellfire seem consistent since their contribution per second is 1/7.

Secondary effects afaik are 95% coefficient, however spells like life drain don't fall in this category - they fall in the category of "spells that also heal you" and therefore receieve 1/2 the bonus.
Also I think spells that are faster than 1.5s also count as 1.5s, not just instants (example paladin's hammer of wrath).

As for debuffs I'd verify first if they actually multiply like that rather than add up. It would actually make more sense if a targte with ISB, misery, shadow weaving and 13% CoS would have 20+5+10+13=48% increased damage or 1.48X, not 1.2*1.05*1.1*1.13=1.57X. Shouldn't be too hard to test on Dr. Boom with a couple friends though.

speaking of Felguard DPS...

Wow Web Stats - 1914 DPS

It's really beneficial on Tidewalker, because while you are busy AOEing, he's hacking away at the boss still without having to "renew" him like a DoT.

I use Felguard spec for pretty much everything in SSC/TK now, and I'm never really beaten on the damage meters. (except fights where I have to do something specifically that lowers my DPS)

Right on both counts. Correcting.


I tested this when writing ShadowSeer. I'm 100% sure most multipliers .. well.. multiply. I didn't test with each and every combination, but all the ones I could stack multiplied.

CoD and Drain Soul have half the gain from spellpower that you would expect (CoD only gets a 200% bonus from damage, Drain Soul gets 7.5/3.5 instead of 15/3.5).

Drain Mana (along with mana burn) is completely unaffected by spellpower.

Finally, AoEs don't seem to exhibit any consistent behaviour with Spellpower. Here are the coefficients I've seen:

RoF: 8/7
Hellfire: 10/7
Blizzard: 8/7
Hurricane: 9/7
Arcane Explosion 1.5/7
Cone of Cold, BW, DB: 1.5/7 * 0.9
FN: Less than 5%.
Flamestrike DoT: 8/45
Flamestrike DD: 3/10.5
Consecration: 8/10.5

Obviously , there are no longer any standard rules for AoE coefficients. Total damage is generally capped at 10 times the average damage per AoE excluding crits, with the exception of the Flamestrike DoT, so at a certain number of mobs, the spell coefficient becomes moot except that you cap out sooner.

You're saying the "10 target cap" isn't based on the actual damage per 1 target but rather the "naked" damage against 1 target? Unless you tested it out I find it very wierd, although I didn't test anything about it myself.

Anyway the AOE spells do *seem* to follow certain rules, it's just that each spell has different attributes that make it follow different rules. For example (assuming your coefficients are corret):
RoF/blizzard - 1/3.5 per second like all spells, 1/2 for being AOE, and then X8 for being over 8 seconds.
IAE - like a 1.5s cast spell but 1/2 because it's aoe
And I suppose you could explain at least some of the rest if you only knew what factors apply there, although it is definitely possible some have an "irregular" coefficient (like CoD or drain soul have).

Anyway I remember reading somewhere AOE was 1/3 and not 1/2, but oh well...

Does anyone have a model they like for calculating improved shadowbolt uptime that they like? I'm aware of shadowseer for measuring what is going on in the current raid, but i'm more interested in a theoretical model for comparing various raid makeups.

For example, consider a tank and spank encounter w/ 3 shadowpriests and 2 warlocks, what is the impact on overall dps for:

2 0/21/40 locks spamming shadowbolt nonstop

vs

1 0/21/40 lock sbolt spamming and one 42/0/17 + 2 refreshing dots and spamming shadow bolt in between.

Obviously I could just measure the same fight over and over again with both makeups using wws and shadowseer, but duplicating otherwise identical raid conditions over and over again is nigh impossible.

*is proud of the fellow Argent Dawnian warlock*

Minor thingies:

It is Curse of Shadow and Curse of the Elements.

Also, being an Affliction warlock myself, I find the bit about hit rating in the corresponding section maybe a bit too short. You could perhaps extend it a bit with discussing when to choose hit and when straight damage? Also please discuss the alternatives for Suppression, once you have more high-end gear, but still want to be Affliction.

Popular idea here is that you are Affliction until you get better gear from Tier 6 instances. As if it is a spec you can and will "outgrow". This is not true for some players (myself included), since the utility and self-sufficiency of Affliction retain their strength even when you personally do not scale as well as other specs with the abundant hit/crit/haste gear. Personal DPS and higher ISB contribution are not always decisive factors in some people's choices. It can be that you just find it more FUN to not spam one spell all the time. Or they want to be able to DPS multiple targets efficiently. It can also just be the fact every raid with a lot of shadow/arcane casters loves one Affliction lock for Malediction.

Players that like the spec and wish to keep it even when raiding tier 6 instances might want to know how the different stats should be valued with their spec in mind even if it is not optimal (it is often "nuke gear") but still (perhaps) the best they can get.

The way you put it (hit>spell dam>rest) is as I said, in my opinion, too short and might give the wrong idea to Affliction locks planning their gear progression.

Nevertheless, great effort and kudo's. And that mod is awesome, although I won't use it personally since the info it gives will probably be: get more spell damage! D'oh! *grins*

Considering the game mechanics are nowhere near what you'd expect them to be, theorethical models of ISB don't seem very useful.

ShadowSeer measures and does educated guesses, it's nowhere near reliable for data extensive data mining. For example: Spells cast on a mob when ISB is up will hit for 20% more damage, regardless of what happens during flight time. ShadowSeer does not model this, for example. It only counts until the debuff is removed, it doesn't take into account what spells are flying at that point.

Also remember that the only spec that doesn't lose DPS by giving an imp to the MT is an affliction spec...

Regarding hit for affliction:
By putting some reasonable stats in lieuler's spreadsheet it gives me that 1 hit rating is almost as good as 1 spell damage, while we know on itemization 4-5 damage = 4 hit rating, which makes hit rating actually not all that great. Considering this is a best case scenario for hit rating (minimum hit rating to cap DoT hit and 100% of DPS time being on a "boss"), hit rating for affliction actually results in *less* of a DPS increase per use of itemization point than spell damage, and thus would socket all red sockets with 9 damage gems, and only put 5 damage 4 hit gems in yellow sockets on items with a any useful socket bonus (crit is still inferior to both).
Remember that if you have higher than minimum hit for affliction spells and/or don't DPS bosses 100% of the time (taking bosses with adds into account), hit gets even worse for affliction.
Regarding suppression, the gains from dropping points there are extremely minimal, as to reach nightfall and emp corruption you need 15 in the lower tier talents, 5 of which going into corruption, 2 in lifetap, but the other 8 can only go in suppression, amplify curse, soul siphon, fel concetration, imp CoA, imp CoW or Improved drain soul. Since the only talents of those that increase DPS (amp curse, suppression and soul siphon) can already be taken with those 8 points, I don't see a reason to get any hit beyond the minimum 6% if you can help it, as your DPS would not increase through talent changes. To put any extra points in demonology you will have to take points out of destruction or higher-tier affliction talents, which doesn't change when you aquire more hit gear.

fixed, thanks.


The compendium is a joint effort built by combining and pruning debates and discussions in this thread and the warlock thread. If you feel that an area is underrepresented, feel free to add your own extension here and I'll merge it.

The example builds are guidelines, to be used as illustration, really. I've tried to highlight the key talents, and left the non-vital choices out. One reason for that was to avoid debate about whether unimportant skill A was better than unimportant skill B. But also because plenty of warlock builds are viable and require a lot of wiggle room.


My personal opinion is that raids are optimal with one affliction warlock, and others in demo/destro. I also think that allowing people to spec according to the playstyle they like makes your raiders happiest, and one could argue that that is most important in a game.

But the scope of the compendium is to detail builds that work best. Playstyle is mentioned, but is not considered vital.


Well, it gives a rough outline, at the end there is a detailed section below explaining why the outline is rough, and there's links to tools to determine how stats work for you. I'll add to the guide that it is, in fact, a rough sketch.

Yes, that is what I'm saying. It's one of the more screwed up things about AoE capping... only the BASE damage of the AoE counts (at least, that's the way it was when it was introduced).

Well, that's the point... with so many varying coefficients and custom rules, you can't even guess at the spell coefficient until you test it out and post it a little table. For example, given what I posted above, what's the coefficient for SoC or Shadowfury?

It used to be that all AoEs followed the rule of (cast time)/3.5 * 1/3 with the 90% modifier being applied to BW, CoC and Hurricane for their 50% secondary effects and cast time being capped out at 3.5 (which was why Hellfire and RoF used to scale so horribly). When Naxx was introduced, spells were allowed to have cast time modifiers greater than 3.5. After the mass AoE/power leveling that happened during the Scourge invasion, some of the AoE spells got capped and some of them got the AoE modifiers raised. But they weren't consistent, since FS got capped and did not get the coefficient raised, while Blizzard got the coefficient raised, and was not capped until 2.2.

At 2.0 it was a horribly inconsistent mess, but 2.2 seems to have gone through and fixed a lot of the AoEs that got left behind. There might be a consistent rule now, and 50% penalty + 10-cap sounds like it is true for standard AoEs with no secondary effects. Consecration and Hellfire seem to have been hit with a 1/3 penalty rather than 1/2... and they're both PBAoE DoTs? I dunno. How recent are all those coefficient data?

The aoe coefficients listed in my post were double checked today. After some testing with multiple gear sets, I was at most 2 points off.

I checked Hellfire, RoF, Bliz, FS DoT, CoC, and AE just before I made my post. The druids over on the WoW forums checked Hurricane about a month ago... I multiplied their results by seven and found that the multiplier was really 9/7... 90% of cast time divided by seven due to the attack speed penalty. Consecration is a pretty well-known number by all the prot pallies on the board. Consecration actually has a relatively high (and unusual) modifier when you consider that it's a AoE DoT

Just rechecked Hellfire again with my level 65 warlock. Maybe the rules change at level 68, but at 65, there's no way that Hellfire gets a 15/7 multiplier. With 484 bonus damage, I was getting ticks of 261. The tooltip says 215. A difference of 46 per tick, so spellpower adds 46 * 15 = 690 damage to the spell. Multiplier is thus ~690/484 = 1.42. Multiply that by 7 and you get 10 (well, 9.98), not 15.

Sorry about the armory link, forgot to update when xferring. Should work now, if not: The World of Warcraft Armory

Yeah..after looking at the gear a little more I think you're right, although its still hard to say [Spellstrike Helm] vs [Destruction Holo-gogs]
I'm guessing spellstrike would be better if i went for the legs as well (instead of the trial fire trousers with 3 +9s), but thats a huge investment in mats for gear that presumably should get replaced anyways.
Also destruction hologogs means meta gem which would mean I could try out that new crit meta.

What is a good baseline DPS for warlocks looking to join a tier 5 guild?

I just went on my first raid on my character. As I've posted on another thread, I'm looking to get back into raiding, and the general consensus there seems to be to skip the Karazhan stage.

I don't have tailored epics or anything quite yet, so this is still a work in progress, but I managed 630 dps on my first Maulgar kill.

I'll try to update this post with a WWS, but I think I botched the combatlog feature, so that will have to wait.

The World of Warcraft Armory

Here is my armory, its obviously a work in progress.


One thing I did have trouble with is maintaining dot rotations on 2 mobs. On a single target I will curse of shadows, and I'll try to place curse of doom on the 2nd mob, and maybe siphon. But I found that if I try to maintain UA/Corr/Immo on the 2nd mob, I lose some uptime on the first.

Do you have Emberstorm?

According to wowwiki base damage is 208, not 216. So that suggest you have 4 points in it. Or wowwiki is outdated. Either way, our data is inconsistent. I'll do some research into this. My tooltip info has been off, as well. I'm not sure what's causing that.

Update: Wowwiki's data is correct. 208 is the base damage (check by walking to IF with a level 1 Warlock)

Update: Shadow Bolt base damage is 541-603. My tooltip says 543-607. I removed all my gear, and have a screenshot of me hitting Boom (no buffs, no gear) for 605. I have no clue why this is.

Your gear is horribly subpar for end game raiding. I'm not sure what a tier 5 guild is, if it means "they have some tier 5" that just means they killed Void Reaver which means nothing, really. If it means "they all are decked out in t5" then you're not going to fit in. I recommend picking up tailoring for FSW and Spellstrike or farming Karazhan. Or both.

As for rotations, on trash I'd start with UA on the main target then spam Agony and Corruption on tanked targets. On boss fights with adds where you can dot freely, just use all your dots on all suitable targets. As long as a dot runs its full duration (not pushed off, target won't die, you don't refresh it too soon) they are highest damage-per-casting-time (dpcs) for an affliction warlock. Refresh the best ones first when they run out, use remaining time to apply the inferior dots, and if everything is dotted nicely, use Shadow Bolts.

Of course, if success hinges on one target dying really fast, you might want to just dot+SB a single one. But in general, the strategy above will result in highest dps.

ShadowSeer will tell you whether you're losing tics on any dot, and how much dpcs each one is, if you're not clear on that front.

That's true, spellstrike will eventually be replaced. I only recently replaced my Spellstrike leggings, and wouldn't replace the helm till T6. As for the goggles, they definitely are quite nice - however, for destruction before the hit cap I'd still lean towards spellstrike hood being better individually. Trying the new crit meta would be nice though!

All in all I found investing into Spellstrike well worth while.

208 is the damage at level 54 when you buy the spell, but the spell's base dps slowly goes up as you level, like any other spell. Anyway, my warlock is a UA warlock with 13 points in Demo (she does a lot of grinding and testing), and so has no modifiers to any Destro spells.

As for the discrepancy, I bet it's a bug. Do a test on your 70 warlock with Rank 3 Hellfire and find out what the coefficient is (it should still get the full coefficient). I bet you our results will match then and we'll have a bug report to submit to Blizzard...

That is the first time I've ever heard about that. Base damage being increased per level, for all spells?

My Corruption was learned at 65. Yet it still has 900 base damage, which is the amount it does when first learned. Hellfire was learned at 68, base damage 306. Mine is listed as 312-313 which is exactly what it should be if you calculate my one point in Emberstorm. However, rank 3 of Hellfire and my Shadowbolts are off.

It's definitely not the case for ALL spells, but it looks like Shadow Bolt did get an increase. Can anyone enlighten me?




Data from hellfire experimenting:

I'm 70. I have one point in emberstorm (2% bonus damage)

with 982 firepower:

Hellfire rank 4 - 457 damage per tic
Hellfire rank 3 - 362.5 damage per tic

with 467 firepower

Hellfire rank 4 - 382 damage per tic
Hellfire rank 3 - 287 damage per tic


On the tooltips:
Rank 4: 313-314 dps (learned at 68: base 306)
Rank 3: 219-220 dps (learned at 54: base 208)


--

analysis for rank 4 at 70 for me:
damage per tic = 457
damage per tic without spellpower = 313.5 (between 313 and 314)

damage per tic without emberstorm = 457/1.02 = 448.04
damage per tic without emberstorm without spellpower = 313.5 / 1.02 = 307.35

bonus from spellpower per tic = 448.04 - 307.35 = 140.7
my spellpower: 982

so spell coefficient = 140.7/982 is about 1/7.

So my Hellfire gets 1/7th of your spelldamage per tic, 15/7 on the whole.

---

analysis for both ranks and both spellpowers gives me the same result: 1/7 of spellpower per tic.

OK, I figured out what my mistake was. I foolishly figured that the the damage you did would equal the damage inflicted on yourself. Turns out that is not the case, Hellfire has a 15/7 coefficient when damaging mobs, but a 10/7 coefficient for self-inflicted damage.

Mea culpa.

As for spells increasing with level, it's just there for most spells. The only way to accurately see the base power of a spell is to look at the tooltip on a character with no talents spent. This is because Blizzard only updates some of the tooltips to reflect the effect that talents have on base damage (for example, Drain Life and Life Tap tooltips are not affected by talents). Anyway, given that there are now new ranks of most abilities obtained within two levels of 70, it doesn't make a big difference.

ive been reading these forums for a while, trying to raise my game by researching what the clever people do etc..

however, i feel the need to actually post, as i seem to have trapped myself into a cycle of inefficiency which is almost worse than being mocked as the warlock who isnt at the top of DPS meters...

firstly, if this isnt appropriate, just delete, but i did see other help type posts in here..

ok, now ive been a lock and nothing else for a few years now, and things really have changed since the MC days..

i understand that i need to cap the To Hit which i have been trying to do with gems and the proper enches.

now, i seem to be underpowered in comparison to other locks who have less gear than i do, which is really confusing.

my cycle in raids is (Curse)UA,Corr,SL,SB,DP,SB,SB,SB,DP (reapply)

or close to that effect. sometimes throwing in Immo or CoD as and when situ calls for them.

that is on single target as ive been told off for DoT spamming even tanked targets for aggro purposes.

obviously on trash i wont be that effective, but i see people with higher output who shouldnt be out doing me..

The World of Warcraft Armory

is it an inefficiency in my set up? - is it on trash i should be dong better? is my cycle not correct?

i put a lot of effort into being a serious player who can be relied upon to play well, but i seem to not be getting quite what i want out of this setup.

many thanks for any help, cheers.

Does someone have a good reasoning/math model about the Shadow Embrace talent?

I'm talking about it's main function, not as an added affliction debuff obviously.

Everything deeper than "it's all wasted with overhealing" would be nice

Wow.

Paragraph - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Some tips:
- It looks like you have a LOT of +hit. 5 points in suppression, and then some more on your gear. A lot of that is wasted.

- Immolate is probably worth it for you. Use ShadowSeer to find out, or Leulier's spreadsheet.

- Use dots on multiple mobs whenever you can. If someone is tanking them (and not tanking anything else) they ought to be able to keep up with the threat easily.

- Make sure your dots are up as much as possible (without refreshing stuff that's not run its course yet). Make sure to have an addon that tracks it. Link a WWS if possible, that'll give us some info to work with.

thank you arelenda,

the reason i am stacking Hit, is i have read that i must hit the 202 cap in order to ensure my spells stick.. now to be fair, i didnt read anything about the 202 in conjunction with suppression but as an affli lock, having sup is almost a given, surely.

in kara, i did notice the amount of resists i was getting before i focussed on Hit, and now with the amount i have got (which is considerably less than 202) i get few resists. So, i should stop stacking and focus on +DMG purely on the other slots?

In regards to the cycle - once i dot up the main target, dotting offtanked targets takes up the time i would have spent SBing the main target so that by the time reapply comes around i probly would only have time for 1 SB. Then of course the 2nd offtanked target needs reapplying as well.

is that how its done? it seems awkward, however i understand raiding isnt meant to be easy, i just like to know if im doing things in the correct way.

I would move 2 points of supporession into 2 points of improved life tap.

You wouldn't give up 30 spell damage for 5 spell hit, would you? Naturally if you had a piece with 25 spell crit, you wouldn't give that up for a piece with 3 more spell damage, right? Every stat has relative values. The spreadsheet at <http://www.leulier.com/> will give you a good starting point for figuring out what these are for your build. For affliction, 1 point of spell damage is going to be worth about 0.7 point of spell hit. Had you not had suppression to max out dots, this would be about 1.2.

In regards to your DOT cycles on two targets... that's okay that you only have time for 1 SB. Think of SBs as fillers in between refreshing dots. You're going to do more DPS and more DPM by applying dots. However, if you have two targets, and your raid leader wants one dead ASAP, ignore the other one and SB the first. You might do 160% your normal damage by splitting your DPS, but your tanks are taking 200% the damage. Minimizing raid wipes always comes before maximizing personal DPS.

For maximizing damage, you should only cast SB if you can't cast any other spell that by the end of its duration has higher damage-per-cast-time than SB. Only Life tap when you would SB otherwise. In fact, if you have so many targets that you're losing uptime on the first mob, then you can drop a lower DPCT dot. If you have enough targets that you could keep busy casting JUST your highest DPCT dot, your DPS should be killer.

You don't need points in suppression if your gear has enough hit on it. Look at the spreadsheet with your gear, but if I recall correctly stacking pure shadow damage has pretty nasty returns.

As an affliction warlock your DoTs should be your highest DpCT. On trash (assuming you don't have to burn down the current target as fast as possible) you should put up DoTs on the main target and then start DoTing up other mobs that are being tanked as well. This will give you the most damage. Even with suppression, you'll eventually want to get more hit from your gear to drop it. The biggest piece advise I (and most others so far) can give you is to put in your stats into leulier's spreadsheet and find your relative values to compare different gear / gem choices.

Edit: I would also work on that grammar thing before you receive another infraction for it =(

Ok, thanks all i got really good advice there. I have Shadowseer now and will be doing an upper Kara run shortly. Hopefully ill be able to put it all into practice with good results and ill post the results.

Thanks again it was highly appreciated

edit: in the raid last night i came 2nd or 1st depending on whether you include a couple of goes on illhoof after prince.. It seems Immo wasnt really doing much, so i dropped using it and used SB instead. Thank you again

Recently I started levelling a(nother) warlock and noticed that the damage I was doing would go up slightly with every level (same rank of spells, of course). Something like 1 more damage per tick, slightly more damage with shadowbolt etc. Now I didn't keep any data of this, nor am I any good with math, so this is mostly anecdotal evidence. But it should be easily reproduced and tested by someone who's good with this stuff.

I've tinkered a bit with another spec, which - at least for me - has proven to be quite useful in a raiding enviroment. The link and details are below.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This is a hybrid build that's crossed my mind while I was playing a SM/Ruin build and it seemed like an improvement, since for higher levels of spelldmg, the heavy-SB reliant dps increases more then just 5%, since SM's 10% dmg is added to initial shadowbolt dmg, while the succ DS debuff adds 15% after spelldmg coefficient calculations (final dmg). I decided to give it a try, since our RL allowed it, and while I can't say I've always been top dps, most of the times when I was free to do a dmg curse I ended up quite high on the dmg meters (being slightly undergeared in comparison to the others in my raid).
The utility of such a build is that it has both Demonic Sacrifice and Ruin, and outputs high-ish shadowbolts (not as high as 0/21/40 or 0/40/21, but still pretty good), as well as instant corruption, improved life tap and the occasional Nightfall proc.

I'd also like to add that I haven't done the maths to verify this against a SM/Ruin spec, but from the trade-offs (losing Blood Pact, Siphon Life, Contagion, Dark Pact -possibly biggest downside of all 3-, while gaining Demonic Aegis, Fel Stamina and Intellect, Demonic Embrace and ofc extra shadow damage from Demonic Sacrifice) it seems worth it in terms of personal dps. This is not a must-have build, but it's an option for those who like high SBs (and improved ISB uptime), as well as instant Corruption and improved CoA.

What I fail to see is how such a build would be an improvement over 0/21/40. I should have to think that the gains in crit from backlash, as well as the 20% extra spell damage applied to your shadow bolts from shadow & flame, would vastly outweigh any potential dps gains from nightfall and instant corruption. Recall that nightfall merely reduces the cast time of a shadow bolt from 2.5 talented to 1.5 seconds to account for the GCD. While I do feel that nightfall is surely a must-have for any affliction-based build, I don't think it's enough to take in lieu of the deeper destro talents.



As far as non-cookie cutter hybrid builds go, I've given some thought to pursuing a 30/21/10 build. I ran a Leulier on it with my current gear setup, and unless I'm mistaken its damage output is nearly identical to the current 0/21/40 build I run. As far as possible pros and cons of such a build...

Advantages:
- Imp LT and SL allow me the ability to rely significantly less on healers to maintain my damage output.
- The mobility afforded by instant corr, SL, and nightfall is invaluable in later content.
- I still get to take advantage of the half-cast meta.
- I get to take advantage of the 4pc T5 set bonus, which is completely inconceivable with 0/21/40. Alternatively, 2pc T6 would do nicely with this build as well.
- 35% bonus shadow damage ensures that the build would scale VERY well with gear.

Disadvantages:
- Debuff slots, debuff slots, debuff slots.
- Lacks the raid utility afforded by SE, Malediction, or the ability to keep ISB up as much as possible afforded by a heavy destro build.

Possible variants/restrictions:
- It's very possible to take 4/5 SE with this build if your guild doesn't have a SE lock already. My current one does.
- Requires that one be hit-capped or nearly hit-capped from gear (but I think that any serious end-game lock should be hit-capped anyway, personally).

Has anyone had any practical experience with BT/Hyjal raiding with such a build, or a variation thereof? Perhaps it's a ridiculous idea, but I'd be curious to hear others' thoughts on it.

This build was already analysed and beaten into the ground, on multiple occasions.

http://elitistjerks.com/506250-post2109.html is one.


In short, you gain imp LT, a better Corruption, and Siphon Life. You lose 8% crit on Shadowbolt, and your Shadowbolts will hit for less than 0/21/40. Given that this spec relies on Shadow Bolt more than anything for its dps output, the results are obvious. Your spell cycle would be Corruption every 18 seconds, Siphon Life every 30 seconds, and every other spell would be Shadow Bolt.

If your healers are unable to compensate for the occasional lifetap a Destruction Warlock needs, then I suggest ditching the 30/21/10 Warlock and getting a healer instead.

Just a few pages back. Start on post #78.

I apologize for not reading everything more thoroughly and duplicate posting. I'm still confused why Leulier says that the two builds return roughly equivalent dps (mine was <5 dps difference between that build and 0/21/40)... less time spent life-tapping over the course of a ten minute fight?? I assume I must be overlooking something.

Thank you for your feedback, regardless.

It's been noted before. I'm not sure why that is. I'm guessing Leulier underestimates ISB (which is downright impossible to model in a spreadsheet).

Improved Life Tap is pretty nice in theory.

To give you an idea:

Destruction warlocks require 400 mana for a Shadowbolt, which they cast approximately every 2.5 seconds, so they use 1600 every 10s. After a minute (9600 mana), mana pool is empty, so further bolts need to be compensated with Life Tap per 4 bolts. That's without BOW or pots.

An estimate of 5 LTs per minute after the first is the very worst case scenario, I'd say. So in a 10 minute fight, it's 9x5=45, which would be reduced to 38ish with Imp LT, so you'd gain 10seconds of casting time in a ten minute fight (600s), under optimal conditions. That's the equivalent of 1.66% haste, roughly, or 25 haste rating. And it makes you require less healing.

Certainly a nice talent, but in no way should you go out of your way to pick it up.

I'm sorry if this question has been discussed before in this thread. Basically what I want to know is what is the general take on adding immolate into the sb spam for your standard 0/21/40 build. From what I can see immolate does more dps than shadowbolt, but from what I've gathered from countless top end guild warlocks, most of em don't do immolate at all.

Their explanation being to keep more ISB's up and at the same time "its more dps". This is what boogles me. So I'd like to hear more opinions on whether to use immo or not.

Survivability/self sustainability aside this is what im looking at:

With immo: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
W/o immo: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

You don't want immolate because:
-It will result in less ISB uptime (big raid dps loss)
-Likely more user error (a second button to press :P, and have to pay attention to Dot-timers)
-Have to pick up talents, which could be used on non-useless things (Nether Prot/Soul Leech)
-Takes a debuff slot
-Doesn't benefit from spell haste
-At high gear levels, SB is more Dmg/Casttime anyways

Only time i'll use immolate is on movement bosses; something like supremus if hes about to go OOR, or Shahraz if shes vuln. to fire and I'm not lazy/feel like pressing another button.

At early gear levels it might be worth it, but SB scales better with crit rating. and hit rating. and haste rating. and +damage. ShadowSeer can tell you if it's worth it for you, it includes dot damage and ISB.

I'm in BT with 0/21/40. I occasionally use it on bosses as my first spell, so I don't risk aggroing to an early crit, and Shadow Weaving/ISB are not up at that point. Other than that, I can only echo what Rochan says.

I dont exactly want to pick up nether prot as i MIGHT be tanking some stuffs here and there once in a while.

As for gear, tbh im really not too sure about taking haste rating because im not in US. I.e. i have a 400~500ping and even with a stopcasting macro i personally dont think i can take much advantage out of the 0.1sec faster casts when my reaction is taken into account :P. Might be interesting come 2.3 tho.

Gear wise I basically have 2 sets which i have yet to test out which does more dps but basically:

More crit = 1236shad dmg, maxed hit, 19.68% crit (w/devastation = 24.68%)
More dmg = 1311, maxed hit, 16.34% crit (w/ devastation = 18.34%)

Definitely dont feel like it is worth trading 80+- dmg for 3.x% crits. Anyways with my current gear is it worth it to cast immo? no?


PS: looking after a 2nd spell is in no way difficult :P ive been affliction for as long as i know so i have no problems keeping ONE dot up lol

With quartz, your reaction is relative to the predicted lag, which means you'd get just as much benefit as someone sitting in the server room.

Read the posts above yours The rhetoric here is you may see marginal DPS gains but by not throwing out your higher-crit bolts as often, you're lowering raid DPS.

And for me it wasn't that keeping a dot up was hard, it's that the biggest losses in casting time are the "between casts" periods. Shorter spells make that happen more.

EDIT: removed NP proc issues -- apparently it's a problem for Kael.

That would only be kinda true if your latency was a fixed number 100% of the time. Since your latency changes you still lose cast time, which isn't directly dependant on your latency but on how much your latency changes.

NP does not work fine on Illhoof. When it procs, the imps will start firebolting a healer instead. Not that it matters that much on Illhoof.

It works fine for Leotheras. It does not proc on him, probably by design.

It does NOT work fine for Kael'thas, though, if you're tanking Capernian. Nether protection procs can get someone killed. Even if you're fast with clicking off the buff (or use the macro) it's one spell aimed at someone else.

Use ShadowSeer if you really want to find out the damage-per-casting-time.

Nether Protection doesn't work on Illidan either it was funny watching people get owned by shadowbolts and people screaming on vent that they pulled agro the first time we had a NP warlock tank.
I've read you can spam some sort of /cancelaura Nether Protection macro while tanking but I've not confirmed if this is reliable or not.

Either way, it's pretty stupid that it makes us unable to tank virtually all bosses Warlocks are supposed to tank.

I've tried using a /cancelaura NP line included in my Searing Pain macro and spamming it (didn't stopcast that for obvious reasons) - and no, it was not reliable at all when tanking Capernian, she still ran at me quite often and I had to resort to kiting her around which was very messy. Had to spec out of NP right after that go.

A long time lurker signing in for duty. o/

Anyway, on to the question. How is the healthstone crit % calculated? Is it the spell crit %, melee crit % or some random fixed number, like 15-20% or so? Now this may sound mad, but during the 2 years I've played this game with the 2 of my warlocks I've never really even thought about this.

Take a look at this Wow Web Stats

Sort by crit rate, and you get everyone that has high spell crit on top.

While not proven, I'd say spell crit % is far more likely than any other possible theory.

Well I guess this could be tested, but as I'm not at home right now. And I'm pretty sure someone has the hard facts about it anyway.

On one hand it doesnt make sense that spell crit % would effect it, seeing as (as far as I know) consuming a healthstone is not a spell effect, rather a consumable effect of some sorts. One guess I've heard was that it would be the spell crit %, but it'd be tallied in when the stone is created, not when it's consumed. That makes no sense at all tbh.

I'd guess consuming a Healthstone counts as a spell, since Healthstone crits can proc stuff like [Shiffar's Nexus-Horn]

There's no such thing as a consumable effect. It's all spells.

Or spell/skill?

Purely anecdotal but I've noticed a lot more health stone crits using a demonology spec then I ever saw with affliction (4% more crit from DT). Generally I eat the health stones I create first (simply because they're the largest) so I can't say if it looks like the affliction locks 2080s crit less often or not.

Again this is purely anecdotal.

The message in the combat log is "Your healthstone heals you for X" or "Your healthstone critically heals you for 2*X", so I suspect it's your spellcrit rate.

Shouldn't they crit for 1.5X?

They do. Don't forget your Fel Armor buffs your healing received - including that received from Healthstones.

It's 1.5x.

Even with buffs, your normal would be 120% and the crit is 1.5X of that 120%...

Some people have mentioned using fighting succubus with lash of pain on certain fights to gain best dps with demo build.

Doesnt lash of pain consume ISB uptime? And if it does is it really worth using?

Hadn't actually bothered checking if Ruin effected them or not. Checking back over my guild's WWS logs, I see one critically healing me for 4717 = 2080 (base) * 1.20 (talented HS) * 1.5 (crit) * 1.26 (talented FA).

They're not "destruction" spells, so this makes sense.

(And yes, I know talented HS only effects the HS produced, not consumed. I just wanted to calculate from the base value, since I couldn't remember the talented value off-hand.)

It does and therefore it's not.

There is no meta gem section.

While atm the MSD is the best Meta (assuming you don't need yellow gems, otherwise use 12 damage)

In 2.3, there are 4 choices:
MSD (nerfed to 45 sec cooldown and 6 second buff, use 1 more blue than yellow)
12 damage (old standby, needs 2 yellow/1 red)
CSD (12 crit rating and 3% better crits, use just 2 blue gems)
Bracing Earthstorm Diamond (9 damage and 2% -threat use more yellow/red than blue)

For Destro/Demon, CSD will be the best, but for Affliction you have a choice. IMO, the BED is the best, because you only need one yellow (use red in other places) and more -threat isn't too bad.

There's also a meta gem from the Ogri'La flask-place event that gives 14dmg/5% stun resist. [Imbued Unstable Diamond], Imbued Unstable Diamond - Items - World of Warcraft
Cost is 100 apexis shards, and requires beating the third wave in the event, which probably takes a 25-man raid with good coordination.

In addition to needing 100 shards (not hard to get) 25 people there to help you, you also need exactly 3 yellow gems.

Not worth getting, the damage lost from 3 yellows is too much (compared to just 2 yellow for +12 damage).

Excellent work. Including.

Are you sure on the gem requirement for this? I know I've seen it mentioned several times on wowhead and thottbot but there's a warlock poster on these forums I armoried that has it equipped and his other gems would break that gemming requirement (he stacks mostly yellow crit/damage gems). The World of Warcraft Armory

Not sure if the armory would show us rather or not the gem was active but it does appear to be active.

It seems all those posters are wrong. Since the meta is appears to be active on that profile, it seems the meta requirement is at least 3 yellow gems.

My opinion remains, for the best dps you use all reds (assuming hit capped), needing at least 3 yellows is bad.


If the OP wants to fix the gem requirements (to at least 3 yellows), might as well add that the Ashtongue Talisman of Shadows is generally not with using, even with instant corruption, due to low proc rate and short duration of the buff.

However, if there was a situation where you could constantly have 2 corruptions up at the same time, the trinket starts to become very useful.

But that's the thing, you might as well have your +hit to cap on 3 orange damage/hit gems, fulfill the Meta requirements, and then have less +spellhit on another item.

Depends basically on what you get your hands on first.

I wouldn't mind updating the compendium, but I'd need to see data.

The yellow gem requirement _seems_ to have been dropped. I don't see it anywhere, while I can see all other meta gem requirements correctly on wowhead and thottbot.

I'll update about the talisman.

It may be worth noting in the OP that when using the succubus with 0/40/21 or any variant that Lash of Pain probably shouldn't be used due to it's affect on ISB uptime.

Or something like that.

That's already mentioned in tips, I think.

Yeah it is actually. Completely missed that line.

"Basic gear choices (see below)
Spell hit > Spell Haste > Spell damage > Spell Crit"

I show Hit > Damage > Haste > Crit for a 1400 spell damage, 25 crit, 12 hit demo 'lock and show damage pulling ahead of haste on a few spec and stat variants. This goes for both full felguard builds and succubus builds (rather or not the succubus is attacking).

Because Demo relies on Immolate and Corruption in the casting rotation I don't see how haste could pull ahead of spell damage for the build, especially considering spell damage affects demon melee damage and haste does not. Unless of course you drop Immolate and Corruption from the cast sequence but even then I show damage ahead for both builds (though the gap gets closed significantly). Am I missing something?

I'm trying to figure out whether or not I should buy BoJ gear in 2.3 that has spellhaste on it, less spell damage, no crit or hit compared to my current gear.. all about maximizing my DPS..

My toons name is Lyblo on Veknilash

armory The World of Warcraft Armory

I raid 0/21/40 i'll be picking up the s3 spellblade for a 146 damage increase (w/ soulfrost) over my current weapon very soon. and i've got about 250 dkp to spend on SSC/TK loot (we're phase 4 on KT so should be entering MH/BT Soonish)

just wondering how many badges I should collect for that gear as I've never used spellhaste before in calculations.

The lieuler's spreadsheet at the front page should answer your haste questions...

Just noticed three oversights:

Spirit
If you have a Priest with Improved Divine Spirit present, 10% (not 5) of your Spirit goes to spell power. Therefore 1 Spirit = 0.1 spell damage.

Affliction
On the first note, add Siphon Life to the list of spells to keep up.

Demo
The ranking says Spell hit > Spell Haste > Spell damage > Spell Crit, but Damage beats haste with Demo, because the Demon gets 57% of +damage you have and Demo still casts Corruption and Immolate, which get little returns from haste.

Edit: Removing post; changes either edited in or I'm blind.

About the 0/21/40, I'm surprised you wrote:
The excel spreadsheet tells me (it may vary a little bit but it stays in that range):
1critrate = ~0.84 dmg
1hasterate = ~0.87 dmg
1hitrate = ~1.37 if not capped, 0 if capped
Shouldn't be Hit > Spell Damage > Haste/Crit ?

On top of that, If we consider that ISB also gives a boost to the affli locks & sp dots (and not only the personal dps boost) the critrate should be a little bit higher.

Not according to ShadowSeer, which translates gained casting time into Shadow Bolt spam plus lifetaps (and incorporates ISB in the calculations). It consistently gives me slightly higher numbers for haste over crit. Haste does suffer from high diminishing returns, though.

I'm not sure why the spreadsheet would different. 0/21/40 typically uses only shadow bolts and curses, though. If you include Immolate or Corruption you might see different results.

Unfortunatly, Shadowseer does not work with the french client :/.
About the spreadsheet it's using only CoD & SB spam.

One thing that is not mentioned at all in the compendium yet, and which maybe is worth mentioning: If your crit increases, you improve not only your own DPS, but also the DPS of your fellow warlocks and shadow priests in the raid via increasing ISB uptime.

Since I wanted to have numbers that are at least a little more precise than handwaving, I tried to include an estimate of the Raid DPS gain via my contribution to ISB-Uptime into my own spreadsheet. While it is not 100% precise, the estimate is not that bad either.

And the results (0/21/40 spec here) were more or less what I expected: For individual DPS, yes, critrating hovers somewhere between 0,8 and 0,9 spelldamage, but for raid DPS it jumps up to between 1,1 and 1,3 spelldamage, of course heavily dependent of the number (and spec) of the other warlocks and shadow priests in the raid.

I'm really interrested by that. Could you please share what you have added to the spreadsheet ?
It would be very interesting to calculate the relative stats coeff based on the raid composition intead of the personal dps impact.

I actually have an [Imbued Unstable Diamond] in my bank, and I can confirm that it requires exactly 3 yellow gems. I don't know why the sites don't show the requirement; it shows clearly on the item in game. I'm keeping it for possible use when I reduce my yellow gems as I get more +hit on my gear.

edit: For anyone curious about the encounter, it seemed trivial compared to Gruul. My guild did the event on a whim when our Gruul raid finished 5 minutes before the event started. We had no idea what would happen and basically just tanked the bosses and AoE'd everything else.

I've been having a hard time deciding whether or not haste would be viable when one has a high variable latency of 400-600 ms. I suppose my logic is with such high latency regardless of how well SBs are stopcasted, stopping some will take long enough to negate any benefit one would get from haste. Would someone with high latency benefit less from haste than someone with say roughly 100ms or less? Or is my logic flawed?

Someone with highly varying latency might see less benefit (although you could make the argument they could be safer while being more aggressive with stopcasting). Having high latency by itself shouldn't matter, though. I would still say that haste will give the same % benefit since no matter the lag, you're just able to stopcast a little more aggressively and still be safe.

Also keep in mind 2.3 is likely coming very soon, so there will be changes to the stopcasting mechanic.

Latency has very small, yet existant, effect on the effectiveness of haste. If you figure out how much time you lose for every spellcast, then figure out the "effective haste" ((old time between casts / new time between casts) - 1, after adding latency), you'll see that you get quite close to the same benefit somoene with 0 latency would be getting, although slightly slightly less.

With latency being X, H being the haste (0.01=1%) and T being the base casting time:

haste gain with latency = (X + T) / (X + T / (1+H)) - 1

Note that X is the time lost and not your actual latency, so even with 1000ms ping if you can stopcast and only lose 0.4s on average between casts then X=0.4 and not 1. Basically if X isn't << T then your DPS sucks so bad no raiding guild will take you anyway, which should be enough to justify my X<<T assumption.

With X << T:
haste gain with latency = H - X*H*(1+H)/T + (a bunch of less significant stuff)

The "bunch of less significant stuff" is less significant because it includes (X/T)^2, ^3 etc which are significantly smaller than X/T if X << T.

As you can see your loss of haste dut to latency is very small and is estimated as roughly X*H*(1+H)/T.

For common haste ratings, H is also << 1 in which case you can estimate the loss of latency as H*X/T, so with 1% haste and 0.2 delay between casts on a 2.5s cast spell you lose approximately 0.01*0.2/2.5=0.0008 or 0.08% hatse, and are left with 0.92% haste where a player with 0 latency would get 1%.

Feel free to copy-paste this explanation wherever is relevant (assuming I made no errors).